I’ve always been attracted to Devo’s approach to art: the theory of de-evolution, the premise of which is that “mankind has actually regressed, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society.” Devo foretold the cheap consumerism and rigid social structures that would flourish during the Reagan years, and their music is a tongue-in-cheek pursuit of a kind of dystopian American ideal, filled with cheap, mass-produced electronic sounds, shallow common-sense philosophy, campy militarism, and wan paeans to individuality. They mastered the art of bad poetry in their lyrics, sticking to strict meters and obvious rhymes; their songs amounted to a teetering Tower of Babel to meaninglessness. They perverted  Kraftwerk’s “man-machine” concept and turned the group into a brand, which fans could buy into by ordering Devo merchandise (most famously the red plastic “flowerpot” hats) from catalogs on the record sleeves. The resulting mix was a clever jumble of lowest-common-denominator commercial music, almost laughably accessible, spliced with high-art social commentary. Read more »

What do you do when your fictional characters starts writing books that outsell yours?

Released last September, Heat Wave is climbing the bestseller lists faster than a monkey who’s found a pair of traction shoes. Fans are crazy about the main character Nikki Heat–based on Detective Beckett of NYPD whom (alleged) author Richard Castle met while helping the men and women in blue solve a murder.

It’s amazing that Castle finds the time to write at all. When he’s not solving murders or attending book launching parties, he plays poker with fellow authors James Patterson, Stephen J. Cannell and Michael Connelly. On the cover of Heat Wave, Patterson says: “Castle hasn’t lost it. Heat Wave looks like another bestseller for the thrillmaster. It’s hot!”

Wow, another bestseller—Castle already has 26 according to his bio. Here’s what else it says: “Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society’s prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration.”

This is a fantastic career, except none of it is real. Read more »

Runoff is  thick: 120+ pages of loose narrative with long lines (20+ syllables per line in the first section) fancy formatting for 56 pages, smallish font—all of which would normally intimidate the hell out of readers. But Matt Hart is exactly right about Runoff when he says, “Your head will spin, your eyes will bulge, you’ll think you could’ve done it, but you didn’t (and you couldn’t)!” Matthew’s images are fresh and precise, his tone is innocuous, his sense of movement seems effortless, and his knack for writing the plain and miraculous and dreadful truth is obvious.

This book is natural. Not only natural in the realm of weather, landscape, birds and horses, trees and hay bails, but also in summer barbeques, dragging out the box of sweaters for winter, blues and booze to pass the time, and the rotation of holiday decorations at Wal-Mart.  It’s a catalogue of one year in the life that Matthew’s knows we know:  “I move through one day, and another / but I take them one at a time, slowly with precaution, I throw caution to the wind / and the wind takes it.” The charm of Runoff is how free it is. Matthews doesn’t bullshit us—he calls it like he sees it. He doesn’t romanticize the everyday to make it interesting.

A fitting selection from the winter section (which has some of that fancy formatting):

“So we knock on bark and say Hello.                     And you bark                                                                                            against the cold air                  the warm air                  you bark as your own means of breathing.”

This selection has typical characteristics of Runoff: a bit of the comic, repetition and slick movement, a slight shift in perspective, the speaker’s engagement with his surroundings, and a suggestion of something philosophical. Most of all, the language is alive. And it’s that liveliness that prevents me from being able to put the book down, that makes me agree when Matthews writes:

We are all fighting for our lives,
and it’s a good time to do so, being strong, being hopeful, being moved
by the thousand things coming up in the world,
by the fight that is all around.

John Farely
1927 East York Ave
Detroit, MI 48201

19 February 2010

The Cathode Ray Review
Literature University
Comstock Bldg.
Utility closet
Boston, MA 02101

Dear Nonfiction Editor,

Enclosed is my personal essay, “Tumescent Eyes” (42,973 Words) for consideration at the Cathode Ray Review. Your ad says you’re looking for environmental/erotica, which is great because my essay is like The Story of O, meets Veggie Tales.

It is the story of my father and his life as a plushy (someone who is compelled to dress up like a caricature to achieve full sexual release). He also worked for the Sierra Club.

Read more »

this image has nothing to do with anything except being awesome.

if you ignore every other link in this post—cool.  but you might wanna check out this archived studs terkel radio interview of bob dylan from 1963.  because what’s cooler than that?

there’s been much ado on the interwebs this week about roger ebert’s profile in esquire.  read it.  then read his response.

the millions made up some wacky idea about dave eggers taking over the paris review.  but, personally, i like the best american non-required reading/826/mcsweeney’s man right where he is. (p.s. if you missed it, the real timothy mcsweeney passed away last month.) Read more »

I couldn't find a public domain picture of T.S Eliot, and I didn't want to get sued. So here's a poster about pneumonia and sharks made by the WPA instead.

It’s probably T.S. Eliot’s fault that my mother doesn’t read poetry. Sure, he died in 1965, and my mother was only 7 or so and I’m pretty sure she never met him. Nevertheless, without Eliot, you don’t get “The Waste Land.” Without “The Waste Land,” you don’t get modernism, and modernism—more than any other movement in poetry—led to the popularization of “difficult” poetry.

A brief rundown: “The Waste Land” was published in The Dial in 1922. It’s an understatement to say that the poem is difficult for the average reader. It contains six languages (seven if you count English). It alludes to at least 25 other pieces of literature, including Shakespeare, the Bible, James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, as well as Hesse, Gerard Nerval, and a slew of others. The annotated version features five pages of footnotes (written by Eliot himself).

The allusions and notes are only part of the problem; the poem isn’t easy to follow. In many ways, it’s a puzzle; the five sections are the poetic equivalents of jump-cuts in film. And the tone and diction (when the poem is in English) aren’t simple. At times the poem is epigrammatic (April is the cruelest month, indeed) whereas at other times, Eliot busts into the lingo of popular culture (O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag).

Read more »

And that's the story of how Uncle Harry burned off all his fur.

I heard on “Radiolab” that babies are born with an innate understanding of numbers. (That original understanding, it turns out, seems to be different from the understanding that kids are eventually taught in order to deal with the human-invented number system, but that’s a different story. A “Radiolab” story, called “Numbers.”) And I remember from my anthropology major days that people are born programmed with much of what they need to acquire language and grammar.*

Do we also come programmed for story?

We know that at literature’s roots is a necessity to pass along information – the oral delivery of folktales, myths and legends, among other genres, to pass along laws, history and safety warnings from group to group and generation to generation. The story is born. But is this human invention born purely of practical necessity, or is there something about something happening to somebody that our brains find irresistible? Read more »

In light of last week’s sudden burst of list activity, I should say that I have something of an obsession with lists: the categorizing, the planning, the whittling, the quibbling. Lovely. 

And in the interest of linking as many times as possible, I should point out that it was Kathryn’s gender breakdown of her bookshelf and Marcus’s big/small publisher dichotomy that brought me to my own bookcases, notebook in hand, to look at the distribution of publishers therein. 

Vintage decimated the competition, with 20.1%, which makes me wonder why the others bothered to show up. Penguin and Harper, the two next highest, only managed 8.9% and 6.1%, respectively. 

Raw data below. 

Read more »

A Common Pornography is the perfect title for a memoir that reminds us there is no such thing. Following his father’s death in 2008, Kevin Sampsell’s family began to speak more honestly about their history, its “disturbing threads,” and Sampsell was compelled to expand his sixty-page memory experiment of the same title into a collage of both his youth and the experiences of his family. The memoir, recently published by Harper Perennial, strings together vignettes, some only a paragraph, some five or six pages, to tell Kevin Sampsell’s story. Read more »

This may be old news by now, but I’ve been thinking about the irony surrounding 17-year-old Helene Hegemann’s best-selling book, Axolotl Roadkill, in which she lifted as much as a whole page from another book called Strobo. She responded to the ensuing scuffle by saying (and I’m sure this sounds better in German): “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

I would love (not sarcastic) if a composition student would say that to me.

So while you may be tempted to yell and point at the cheater until she gets knocked out of the running for her book prize, there does seem to be a clear self-referential quality to her use of words. One of the lines she lifted from the author of Strobo was: “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.” Metafiction?

Then I remembered I have a character in a recent story I wrote riding around on a bicycle singing lines from Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” Plagiarism?

As writers we often find something fresh by taking “found” words out of context, and, to use Hegemann’s club-scene terminology, remixing them. I wonder if this only becomes a problem if the work that results feels like a gimmick. If it works, then it feels fresh, and people are happy. One German book critic and supporter of Hegemann’s work agreed “I believe it’s part of the concept of the book.”

In any case, I have to say: all this media attention makes me (and many German readers, apparently) want to jump on the bandwagon and check out Hegemann’s book.

Read the full New York Times article here.