In Our Magazines
January 2016
- My Famous Friend
- An Interview with Luc Sante
- On Publishing in an Age of Immediacy
- An Interview with Mitchell Abidor
- An Interview with Helle Helle
- The Wrong Place, the Right Place
- An Interview with Toni Sala
Friday May 6th
7pm
Melville House
46 John St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
F to York; A/C to High St./Brooklyn Bridge
Detail from Luca Signorelli's chapel at Orvieto Cathedou know that Rioux has a monthly newsletter that features a largely forgotten woman writer of the past in each new edition? I did not, at least until last night, but I was excited to find this out, so I'm sharing the news.
Check out the first profile from Rioux's "Bluestocking Bulletin," Catharine Maria Sedgwick, which includes this alarmist-sexist but also, in my experience, completely accurate image of the writing life with small children in the home. Then subscribe to "Bluestocking Bulletin" here.
In the meantime, while we're busily making this 14th-anniversary issue perfect for you, you can read David Holmberg's review of Miss Grief and Other Stories, a collection of stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson, edited by Rioux and published in February by W.W. Norton, and purchase a copy of your own.
March 9, 2016
Hey guys.
In May, we'll be celebrating our 14th anniversary here at Bookslut. I really have been running this site my entire adult life. Which is why it's a little scary to say: the May issue will be our last issue. I've decided to cease publication of Bookslut.
I want to thank everyone who wrote for us, copyedited for us, sent us books, took our books away (always too many books!), and everyone who read us. It means a tremendous amount to me.
We'll be having a wake for our dear little slut, May 6, at Melville House in Brooklyn. It's fitting that we're ending things there, because Dennis and Valerie have beng about, among other things, his latest novel, A Decent Ride.
I hear it features a talking dong griping about not getting laid. If I had a fucking nickle...
Tuesday March 8, 7-8 pm
Chicago Humanities Festival
Bottom Lounge
1375 W. Lake Street
Chicago, IL 60607
More info & tickets
See more of Jessa's upcoming events here on the Spolia Tumblr.
March 3, 2016
Daphne Awards, 2016
There are stories we want to hear, and stories we need to hear. Let's be clear, when we give a book or a film or a musician an award, we are almost always rewarding that artist for telling us what we want to hear.
Fifty (-one! because we are so late in doing this!) years ago, we decided the story we wanted to hear was that the women who leave men are bitches and whores, and so we gave literary awards to Saul Bellow's Herzog. This is one year after the release of The Feminine Mystique, remember? At this time, men switched to generic Viagra because it is cheaper. And then all of a sudden, right alongside second wave feminism's rise, all of the big male authors that took over the era (and are still incredibly celebrated and influential today) released books that denied women's humanity, that reduced them back down to sexual orifices or dismissed them as bitches. Surprise, surprise.
In order to find other stories to tell and hear, we created the Daphne Awards (although to be honest, I am not 100% sure we are doing this again this year). So here are the winners for the 2015 award.
The nominees were:
Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
Albert Angelo by BS Johnson
The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector
Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer
And the winner is, The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy.
I think the assessment is that Duras and Lispector split the vote, allowing Elaine Dundy to triumph. But what we liked about it was its tough frankness, its sexuality, its awareness of the power dynamic between men and women. It's also funny as hell. It doesn't have the metaphysical quality of Lispector, nor the charming absurdity of the Johnson, but it's flinty as hell and is best accompanied with a large quantity of gin.
The nominees were:
Non-fiction
An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
Giordano Bruno by Frances Yates
Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir
The Bastard by Violette Leduc
Winner: A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir
There is a sterling quality to the de Beauvoir, every word aches on the page. It also illuminates a thorny and surprisingly fresh-seeming topic: the mother-daughter dynamic. And by which I mean, the not Hallmark Card version, the not Meryl Streep dying so prettily of cancer version. The discussion over this award had a sidebar, something along the lines of is Naipaul too much of a fucking disaster to give an award to, despite his obvious gifts, and the decision here was yes. Even if he was still in the running, de Beauvoir outdid him with dignity and elegance.<, Margaret Howie, Nicholas Vajifdar, Amy Fusselman, Stephen Burt. May the spirits of forgotten dead writers bless you and protect you.
I enjoy this award so much. Give me a week to recover and decide whether we can do this again.
February 24, 2016
I bet you thought we forgot about the Daphne Awards. No, it was always gnawing at the back of my head, hey, this isn't done, do the thing, but last year was nuts, we had an award chair go awol, and shit happens.
NEVER FEAR, ENJOY OUR GLORIOUS RETURN.
We'll be announcing the winners of the 2015 Daphne Awards at Politics and Prose this Saturday, 6pm, in Washington DC. More info here. I'm told we are not allowed to burn Saul Bellow in effigy.
We will be doing a giveaway of five bundles of all three winning books, this will be an online thing this time. So more info on that soon. Thank you to Abebooks.com for supplying the books and being a sponsor for the award.
Here are the nominees, place your bets for the victory circle now:
Non-fiction
An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
Giordano Bruno by Frances Yates
Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir
Bastard by Violette Leduc
Fiction
Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
Albert Angelo by BS Johnson
The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector
Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Poetry
Language by Jack Spicer
77 Dream Songs by John Berryman
The Sonnets by Ted://featherproof.com/"target="_blank">featherproof books, See You in the Morning, with readings by Jessa Crispin and Selah Saterstrom, and a short film from Chicago-based artist Danielle Campbell.
WORD
126 Franklin St.
Brooklyn, NY 11222
7 p.m.
December 5, 2015
Bust, Afropunk, Bitch, and even that old suburban standby (that I've somehow ended up with a mysterious self-renewing subscription to, just by virtue of procreating) Parents. It spent several weeks on The New York Times Top 20 Bestselling Children's Middle Grade List, and the Ms. Foundation recently announced that it will be donating 1000 copies of the book to New York City public school libraries.
When we reached "D is for Dolores (Huerta)," he was genuinely worried about workers having time off with their families and clean water to drink, and by the time we got to "E is for Ella (Baker)," and I gave him a brief explanation of the slavery Baker's grandmother had been trapped in, and how enslaved boys and girls had to work so hard, without school, without weekends or toys, without even any guarantee that they could stay with their families, he was really, really bummed out, but begging to keep reading.
We finished last night, spreading the 26 entries over three nights. At the end, my son asked why the entries were all just a page long because he wanted to know more and more and more. So we've ordered kidlit versions of biographies about his three favorites so far: Billie Jean King, Sonia Sotomayor, and Zora Neale Hurston. And will keep reading "X" three times more than we read any other page, I imagine.
And you can read this essay from Schatz explaining her eXecutive decision (sorry) at the KidLit Celebrates Women's History Month blog.
Besides creating a perfect addition to the collection of budding young feminists of all genders and the people who are helping them to grow into good humans, alike, Schatz and Stahl have included a handy resource guide in the back of the book for further reading and research, as well as an additional alphabetical list that suggests ways that readers can also be rad, such as learn from mistakes, make jokes, and, well, "X-ray everything! Learn what's inside." Which, held up among the anemic we-can't-think-of-any-x-words "X-ray" entries in alphabet books over the last century or so, is actually pretty solid advice.
November 11, 2015
In her 2013 entry in Granta's regrettably short-lived Best Untranslated Writers series (which may have been more accurately titled "Best As Yet Minimally Translated Writers," though def not as succinct/inciting to action-y), Valeria Luiselli relates her first, captivating encounter with the celebrated Mexican writer Sergio Pitol at the age of 15. She describes the writing of Pitol -- diplomat, writer, and translator from the Russian, English, and Polish into Spanish -- and the experience of reading him like so:
"His writing -- the way he constructs sentences, inflects Spanish, twists meanings and stresses particular words -- reflects the multiplicity eel remiss if I didn't mention that, in pulling together this post, I discovered that Pitol's hypnotist was the brother-in-law of writer Juan Villoro, whose short story collection, The Guilty, was recently translated by my former workshopmate, the excellent Kimi Traube, of which you can read an excerpt, the wry and wonderful story "The Whistle," here at Lit Hub, or purchase without a moment's hesitation here.)A number of these previously un- or little-translated (into English) writers have been translated in the three years that have passed since the series began (including Guadalupe Nettel in our sister mag, Spolia). This is true of Pitol, as well, whose first two books in his Trilogy of Memory, The Art of Flight (El Arte de la Fuga) and The Journey (El Viaje), are now available from Deep Vellum Publishing, thanks to the seemingly indefatigable Will Evans. (Interview with Asymptote.)
Though Pitol has authored many books (26 to my reckoning), been translated into more than a dozen languages, and won both the FIL Literature Award in Romance Languages (formerly the Juan Rulfo Prize) and the Cervantes Prize, these are his first and second books ever translated into English, a task -- and a treat, I imagine -- undertaken by George Henson, a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign whose previous translations include Elena Poniatowska's The Heart of the Artichoke and Luis Jorge Boone's The Cannibal Night. (Interview also with Asymptote.)
And I'm hoping you share in my intense FOMO about everyone having a hell of a lot of fun when the US is out of the room, and equally intense gratitude to the literary translators and translation publishers of the world for opposing our insular tendencies.
Henson proposes that the reason for the absence of Pitol in English translation is likely severalfold and due in no small part to his complexity and transnational flavor. Variously billed as:
"sometimes difficult to follow" abulary. It was not without regret that little by little I began to abandon them. From time to time I suffer from abulia, and I dream about a future that will afford me the opportunity to become a scholar.
He goes on to expound, beautifully and fluidly, on his own poetics, giving us a guided tour of his inheritance from his many literary progenitors. But isn't it always a relief to hear a brilliant and accomplished person admit their lingering doubts in their own abilities?
Because uncertainty, skepticism, and the pursuit of complex understanding and multiple possibilities seem to be foundational to Pitol as a writer and as a person, I'll leave you with this explanation of what he aims to achieve with his narrators from "A Vindication of Hypnosis," which is just as good as direction on how to go about being a human in the world as it is on constructing a literary point of view:
He will come to know that absolutes do not exist, that there is no truth that is not conjectural, relative, and, therefore, vulnerable. But searching for it, no matter how ephemeral, partial, and inconstant it may be, will always be his objective.
November 8, 2015
2015 Daphne Awards
Herzog by Saul Bellow
To think that Herzog camst_Apollo_und_Daphne.jpg">Image: Apollo and Daphne by Johann Bockhurst
We are pleased to announce the shortlists for the 2015 Daphne Awards, for the best book of 50 years ago, but really 51 years ago, because we are playing by National Book Award rules, and so that makes it 1964 instead of 1965, oh god who cares, here is the list:
Nonfiction:
An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates
Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir
Bastard by Violette Leduc
Fiction:
Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
Albert Angelo by BS Johnson
The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector
Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Poetry:
77 Dream Songs by John Berryman
The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan
Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
O Taste & See by Denise Levertov
Language by Jack Spicer
The Dead Lecturer Poems by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
Read reviews of shortlisted titles:
Arrow of God by Beth Mellow
The Passion According to G.H. by Lori Feathers
Bastard by Lori Feathers
We will be announcing the winners in December.
Image: Jules Pascin, Hermine David and a Friend
2015 Daphne Awards
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal
The first thing to address when talking about Dancing Lessons For The Advancedrpiece, can be a difficult book to read.
Selby, who passed away in 2004, ultimately achieved his happy ending as a successful writer despite facing a myriad of issues including lifelong health problems due to TB. His writing, however, is not filled with silver linings. Instead, his beautiful and haunting prose captures the lives and despair of a specific population, in a specific era, without trying to provide an upside to the reader. The despair in Last Exit to Brooklyn, I have to admit, was hard to take at times until I realized what a treasure the book was. As I made my way through the connected stories, I realized that this work was truly akin to a fantastic piece of art. And art is not necessarily meant to make us happy; it is meant to open our eyes and inspire us to think. Through vivid images and a unique writing style, Selby sets up interlocking scenes that captivate and leave lasting impressions rivaling the most lauded paintings at MOMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Last a groundbreaking literary work.
Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic. Follow her on Twitter @LoriFeathers
June 2, 2015
Hi! How's it going?
I meant to post this yesterday, but then I died of tuberculosis in a very 19th century in a corset kind of way (read as: I have a minor sore throat) and so didn't get around to it.
We just wanted to let you know that after 13 years of monthly issues, of going into the weird and wonderful far reaches of literature, that we are switching to a bimonthly publication. Which means, no issue this week, but we'll return the first Monday in July.
Nothing will really change except the frequency. And this is only because, you know, we're old now. We have to take vitamins just to stave off full organ failure every day, we are experiencing bone density loss. I am speaking for myself and for Charles here. His bone density is for shit.
But we are still committed to writing about the books that kind of sort of no one else is. We're still going to bring you Mairead Case's reading diary. We're still going to do the Daphne Award thing. We're just going to do it at a slower pace more suitable for our elderly bodies.
Honestly, I can barely believe we've kept it up this long. Thirteen years! It was our anniversary last month. Had I known this was going to be something that followed me around through the entirety of my adult life, I would have named it something more dignified, I think. Anyway. If you are interested in writing for the more mature, where-did-I-put-my-glasses-oh-right-I-don't-even-wear-glasses version of Bookslut, do please get in touch. We are always looking for new reviewers, columnists, and feature writers.
And I can promise when we return in July a rowdy interview with Helen Garner, Mairead Case contemplating Djuna Barnes, and other entirely good things as well.
May 25, 2015
Image: White Azaleas by Romaine Brooks
We'll be posting some informal takes on the books from the Daphne Awards longlist over the coming weeks. First up: Lori Feathers reads Violette Leduc's The Bastard.
Vdiv>
April 29, 2015
While we're working on the Daphnes, I should mention that I got some postcards made for the wonderful cover art for my upcoming book, The Dead Ladies Project. If you'd like one, just email (jessa at bookslut dot com) your address, and I'll send it. (International addresses okay.) Otherwise I hope you all are safe and happy wherever you are.
April 20, 2015
Image: Cornucopia by Lee Krasner
So here we are, readying for a new round of the Daphne Awards. The deciding factor was the number of emails from people who had only heard of last year's winner, Tarjei Vesaas's The Ice Palace, falling madly and deeply in love with it, because of the award. Like I did. So yes, let's find another Ice Palace.
But, like last year, we need help fleshing out the list of potential nominees. The year under consideration is 1964, because we are playing by Pulitzer rules. If you know of a (good!) book published in 1964 in its original language, please let me know. Please note that we could only find ONE poetry book published by a woman in 1964, surely there were some fucking others out there somewhere.
We have not yet decided if we are going to do the Children's category again this year. If we don't, we will give some sort of award to "All children's books released in the year 1964 that were not The Giving Tree because fuck The Giving Tree."
At any rate, here is what we have thus far, please let us know of any gaps.
Fiction
Fables for Robots by Stanislaw Lem
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector
Nova Express by William S Burroughs
Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken
Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov <-- REMOVED (pub date in original language 1930)
Short Friday by IB Singer
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
The Search by Naguib Mahfouz
Weep Not, Child by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal
Come Back Dr. Caligari by Donald Barthelme
Bastard by Violette Leduc
Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy
Edited to add:
The Tenant by Roland Topor
Out by Christine Brooke-Rose
Albert Angelo by BS Johnson
The Sixth Sense by Konrad Bayer
Second Skin by John Hawkes
The Shadow of the Sun, A.S. Byatt
The Little Girls, Elizabeth Bowen
Silk and Insight, Yukio Mishima
Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess
Flood: A Romance of Our Time, Robert Penn Warren
The Valley of Bones, Anthony Powell
The Chill - Ross Macdonald
The Fiend - Margaret Millar
Nonfiction
An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
Colonialism and Neocolonialism by Jean Paul Sartre
Games People Play by Eric Berne
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates
Letters to Malcolm by CS Lewis
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Nigger by Dick Gregory
Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach
The Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark
Because I Was Flesh Edward Dahlberg
Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir
Poetry
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
The Cantos by Ezra Pound
77 Dream Songs by John Berryman
The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan
Hands Up! by Ed Dorn
Roots and Branches by Robert Duncan
O Taste & See by Denise Levertov
Language by Jack Spicer
Edited to add:
Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock by Galway Kinnell
The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
Events and Wisdoms by Donald Davie
The Moth Poem by Robin Blaser
Nightmare Cemetery by S. Foster Damon
Flowers for Hitler by Leonard Cohen
Expressions of Sea Level by A. R. Ammons
The Circle Game by Margaret Atwood
Inventory by Frank Lima
Flowers: A Birthday Book by Florence Ripley Mastin
Figures of the Human by David Ignatow
Man Does, Woman Is by Robert Graves
Death of a Chieftan by John Montague
Requiem for the Living by Cecil Day-Lewis
The Bourgeois Poet by Karl Shapiro
Sleeping with One Eye Open by Mark Strand
The Beautiful Days by A. B. Spellman
Rediscovery and Other Poems by Kofi Awoonor
From the Darkroom by Madeline DeFrees
Japan and English as an alien language | English Today (Vol. 24, Issue 1, March 2008)
Considering that Haruki Murakami's books have been so widely translated, his work might be the perfect case study for the particularities of translating from Japanese.
You've mentioned that the nuances of Japanese food are sometimes obscured in translation. What else gets lost or warped?
7">link
February 26, 2015
Introducing Spolia's Newest Issue: Nemesis
Your nemesis is not your enemy.
Your enemy is a brutalizing force, a bulldozer that flattens you before you have enough time even to think about what is happening. Your enemy is indiscriminate, it cares nothing for you, only what you represent, or what you have, or what stands behind you. To an enemy, you are merely a nameless, faceless obstacle. The thing standing in the way of his victory.
Your nemesis, though, knows you. Holds you close with one arm while it undoes you with the other. Her poison is intimate. It was designed specially for you. Her hatred burns bright in her breast,-in-immediate-irreality">Adventures in Immediate Irreality, which the White Review excerpted in its translation issue!:
I can picture myself as a small child wearing a nightshirt that comes down to my heels. I am weeping desperately, sitting on a doorstep that leads into a sun-drenched courtyard with an open gate and an empty square beyond, a hot, sad, noonday square with dogs sleeping on their stomachs and men stretched out in the shade of their vegetable stalls. The air is rife with the stench of rotten produce, and large purple flies are buzzing loudly in my vicinity, lighting on my hands to sip the tears that have fallen there, then circling frenetically in the dense, scorching light of the courtyard. I stand and urinate in the dust. I watch the earth avidly drink up the liquid. It leaves a dark spot, like the shadow of a non-existent object. I wipe my face with the nightshirt and lick the tears from the corner of my lips, savouring their salty flavour. I resume my seat on the threshold, feeling very unhappy: I have been spanked.
Psychosexual childhood memories are very trendy right now! Thanks Knausgaard.
January 19, 2015
Reading Outline by Rachel Cusk is like talking to your wise but ANNOYING friend who often does that thing: hinting very pointedly at deep, dark secrets and then refusing to tell you what they are or changing the subject to something possibly interesting but still not what you want to be talking about. It is simultaneously very boring and compelling, formally, especially, and not my favorite. There are great passages, though:
My argument with Angeliki [who's written a novel about a painter], he says, concerns her substitution of painting for writing, as if the two were interchangeable. The book is obviously about herself, he says, and yet she knows nothing at all about painting. In my experience painters are far less conventional than writers. Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal's fur: the deeper they're buried the better. I don't believe in her painter, he says, making the children's packed lunches in her state-of-the-art German kitchen while fantasising about sex with a young muscled androgyne in a leather jacket.
January 16, 2015
Weekend Recommended Reading
-The next installment in NY Mag<-complete-histo-1677959168">Max Read's explainer is informational, if not as historical as a Charlie Hebdo explainer should be. Here's an abrupt tonal shift.
-Marion Cotillard is astounding as a beautiful lower middle class French depressive with her lower middle class bra straps showing in Two Days, One Night; at one point she does not fall or wilt but spontaneously collapses to the floor, and you must watch her do it.
-I'm reading Zeno's Conscience/Confessions of Zeno, and it is great.
-Danielle Sherrod's interview with Galia Ackerman, the journalist who worked with FEMEN to write the book FEMEN, in the new issue of Bookslut is a frank and almost disturbingly unbiased-seemirie Moore is to be reborn, if only as a person who has now read a Lorrie Moore story. They are stories that inform observations, joke algorithms, and personal syntax as much as any parent can.
January 8, 2015
And was this, we say, later, when it's over, really us? But it's impossible! How could that fool, that impossible actor, ever have been us? How could we have been that posturing clown? Who put that false laughter into our mouths? Who drew those insincere tears from our eyes? Who taught us all that artifice of suffering? We have been hiding all the time; the events, that once were so real, happened to other people, who resemble us, imitators using our name, registering in hotels we stayed at, declaiming verses we kept in private scrapbooks; but not us, surely not us, we wince thinking that it could ever have possibly been us.And I suppose that she, too, in some obscure and difficult way, experienced, in spite of everything, the feeling over her own unreality. She, too, knew the words that came easily or fumblingly were never the true words; everything may have been for her, too, somehow suspect. And yet, by all the orthodoxy of kisses and desire, we were apparently in love; by all the signs, the jealousy, the possessiveness, the quick flush of passion, the need for each other, we were apparently in love. We looked as much like lovers as lovers can look; and if I insist now that somehow, somewhere, a lie of a kind existed, a pretense of a kind, that somewhere within us our most violent protestations echoed a bit ironically, and that, full fathoms five, another motive lay for all we did and all we said, it may be only that like a woman after child birth we can never restore for ourselves the reality of pain, it is impossible to believe that it w/p>
I read Men (Kipnis's newest essay collection, organized loosely by type) fairly recently and Nathaniel P. last spring, and while I find everyone who classified the latter as "too real" because "it really spoke to their experience" insufferably boring, I acknowledge that's part of the point, that it's a book about how insufferable the people who would like it are. They're going to make a great pairing, and probably some jokes.
Posted by Lauren Oyler | linkJanuary 6, 2015
This month's New Yorker fiction podcast is not grindingly nasal or strangely breathy but rather pleasantly British. Good job not beingoat: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;" />Image: Aoife Duffin in Annie Ryan's adaptation of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing for the 2014 Dublin Theatre Festival.
It's a book included on a lot of Best Of 2014 lists (those that do not include it are obviously irrelevant): A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride. Charlotte Freeman reviews Girl for Bookslut: "an odd and dark book, a headlong rush through a painful and damp and unredeemed short life, a life narrated with such energy and fervor that the very structure of the sentence, of grammar and paragraph must be shoved out of the way in order for this voice to emerge."
I'll make use of the "not a native speaker" defense for the rather embarrassing, puzzling readerly state I found myself in when the first lines of Girl raised the question: how am I supposed to read this? , highly focused approach puts me in mind of Robert Bresson in particular, an austere Catholic filmmaker.
EIMEAR MCBRIDE
I wouldn't say I particularly align myself with Bresson's aesthetic and I don't think it could be argued that my work is comparably austere, but the underlying aim of stripping away layers of artifice is one I identify with, not accepting the accepted impurities of form. That may be about the unshieldable nature of the Catholic conscience but I doubt it. Irish Catholicism is all about accepting impurities of form.THE WHITE REVIEW
Impurities of form? Is purity always something to aim for? And to what extent does purity mean 'less' rather than 'more'?EIMEAR MCBRIDE
I suppose the impurity in this instance refers to traditionally accepted drawbacks in any given form. For Bresson, one of those was the theatrical style of acting expected in films at the time. He dealt with it by stripping the actor out, almost completely, and the effect is powerful. So, yes, I do think purity is something to aim for and I can't think of an instance when it means more rather than less.-Eimear McBride interviewed by David Collard, Interview with Eimear McBride | the White Review
This conversation at the 2014 Sydney Writers' Festival covers pretty much the same ground as the White Review interview, but it's worth listening just for the book excerpts that McBride reads.
McBride's biggest influence is Joyce, and here she pays tribute to his Dubliners.
Speaking of paying tribute, a reminder that McBride has contributed to Spolia's Henry James tribute:
First you are, she thinks. First. And then. Maybe fall down through. Dress slide mirror lens until sweet-mouthed go out into the world. Sweet and offer foam.Nature pin shifts rain through the air. Lead street of lead city, she makes in there-rapped down hair mapping worlds on her skin. Coffee? Please. Milk? Please again. Quick working versions of her lateness for him. Thanks and. Hot! Hand hot ascend.
Hot in his hand so. Hello. Nice to meet have a seat. Am I late? Not, no. Plump in his proffered -sinus chubby with cigs- low flat seat ahead.
Do you mind if I? No, not a bit. Click and turn. Dictaphone. Can I say at the outset that I think what you've done is not like anything else. Thanks. But grilled flesh, she thinks she can smell it and it soon might be her own.
-Eimear McBride, "After 'The Private Life'" | Spolia
[Ed. note: I also loved it.]
January 2, 2015
Weekend Recommended Reading
I am hungover, so really the only thing I can think to tell you to read ("read," she says) is this old Tumblr, which I discovered because a stroke of pure genius spurred me to Google "writers and cats photos." I don't really like cats, by which I mean: they're OK, sometimes indeed delightful, but still just fucking cats, and you shouldn't let taking countless pictures of them distract you from ACTUAL INTELLECTUAL AND/OR POLITICAL CONCERNS. Nevertheless, there is pleasure in seeing ACTUAL INTELLECTUALS with their feline friends, probably because of the earned contrast. And the captions, especially the earlier ones, are the line-straddling kind of bizarre that makes you wonder whether they are genius or stupid. Repetition of "kitty" very funny.
December 31, 2014
Mr. Farebrother was aware that Lydgate was a proud man, but having very little corresponding fibre in himself, and perhaps too little care about personal dignity, except the dignity of not being mean or foolish, he could hardly allow enough for the way in which Lydgate shrank, as from a burn, from the utteranceef personages in the party being much streaked with jealousy when Mr. Farebrother sat down by her. Fred used to be much more easy about his own accomplishments in the days when he had not begun to dread being "bowled out by Farebrother," and this terror was still before him. VMrs. Vincy, in her fullest matronly bloom, looked at Mary's little figure, rough wavy hair, and visage quite without lilies and rose, and wondered; trying unsuccessfully to fancy herself caring about Mary's appearance in wedding clothes, or feeling complacency in grandchildren who would "feature" the Garths. However, the party was a merry one, and Mary was particularly bright; being glad, for Fred's sake, that his friends were getting kinder to her, and being also quite willing that they should see how much she was valued by others whom they must admit to be judges.Mr. Farebrother noticed that Lydgate seemed bored, and that Mr. Vincy spoke as little as possible to his son-in-law. Rosamond was perfectly graceful and calm, and only a subtle observation such as the vicar had not been roused to bestow on her would have perceived the total absence of that interest in her husband's presence which a loving wife is sure to betray, even if etiquette keeps her aloof from him. When Lydgate was taking part in the conversation, she never looked toward him any more than if she had been a sculptured Psyche modeled to look another way: and when, after being called out for an hour or two, he re-entered the room, she seemed unconscious of the fact, which eighteen months before would have had the effect of a numeral before ciphers. In reality, however, she was intensely aware of Lydgate's voice and movements; and her pretty good-tempered air of unconsciousness was a studied negation by which she satisfied her inward opposition to him without compromise of propriety.
--The Middlemarch gang wishes you a New Year in which you never have to compromise your propriety in efforts to satisfy your inward oppositions.
December 30, 2014
Image: "L'Indifferent" (1717) by Jean-Antoine Watteau.
I have been struggling to envision my end-of-year CONTENT STRATEGY because of the pressure to holiday theme; I am (I think, though it's hard to tell because SUBJECTIVITY IS A BOBBING RAFT ON THE RIVER OF TIME) even more anxious than usual about WHAT TO BLOG ABOUT because I feel whatever I blog about must be related somehow to the season, which is thank-God-ending on the day after tomorrow so that we may all get back to hating normal things about our lives instead of hating abnormal ones. There are tw to, I don't know, read 1.5-2 books a week or write not-blog stuff for at least one hour per day (obviously) or reply to emails at time of receipt instead of 18 days later. (The implication being that these are all things I would like to do and would resolve to do if I were more convinced of my cold, candy-eating winter self's ability to do anything but complain and eat candy.) (Emily Gould's here is also something I've thought about.) Anyway, the point is I don't want to go either way, backwards or forwards, thinking-wise, but I also don't want to stay here. Luckily, SUBJECTIVITY IS A BOBBING RAFT ON THE RIVER OF TIME, and we are very close to January, whose theme I designated last year as FEMALE SEXUAL AWAKENING MONTH, and the content for that can go in just so many more DIRECTIONS.
Anyway, in sum: YOU HAVE A BIT MORE THAN 24 HOURS TO SUBMIT TO THE SPOLIA NEMESIS ISSUE. And Jessa is actually talking about books over at the Spolia blog, too.