Shira’s post below reminded me of a story by Shawn Vestal, called The Pig of Happiness, which is one of the best short shorts I’ve ever read. It starts like this:
The story is called The Pig of Happiness and you’ve read it out loud for days now, it seems, when the only thing that will make baby calm down are the pictures of these pale pigs and your voice describing the way that one of them decides to be happy and spread happiness into the world like a neutral-colored paste sneaking from the leghole of an improperly sealed diaper.”
The story continues for another four paragraphs. Short shorts seem to almost always require surprise at the end, some kind of hard turn that makes the reader want to go right back to the beginning to read again. And again. Vestal’s has that, sort of, but the big shift is actually much more gradual. The story takes on weight and context line by line, the narrator becoming kind of disturbing as the piece goes on and he’s sort of torturing his kid. It’s also hilarious, not only regarding being a parent, but in the way it comments on stories themselves or how we sometimes talk or think about them as writers. Like any good short short, “The Pig of Happiness” is striking because of how much ground it covers in such a small space. And when I get to the end, I always think, How did we get here? thrilled that the story has done so much and landed so far from where I thought it would or could possibly go, and all in under 400 words.
Asunder, a collection of stories by Robert Lopez, was released by Dzanc last month. I love this trailer, and the book is fantastic. Willow Springs first published several of these stories, including Bleeders and Vaya con Huevos, two of my favorite stories of the last four hundred years. You can buy the book directly from Dzanc here. Or you can buy it elsewhere. A review of Asunder at The Rumpus asserts that “If Lopez’s earlier books didn’t prove to readers that he is a word-storm, a force of literary nature come unhinged, blowing shutters against readers’ houses, then Asunder surely will. This is a collection as proof, a collection as loveliness, a collection as rippage, and we are lucky to get it into our waiting hands, its words into our heads.” Asunder is a great new book of stories by one of my favorite writers.
Hobart is a cool magazine, the current issue of which feature work by Peter Markus and Steven Rinella, among many others. Hobart always promotes itself with vice items at AWP, ashtrays, shots, etc., which I think is funny. Right now, a subscription to Hobart comes with a flask and a chapbook. What a phenomenal gift for that boozy, literary someone in your life. Hobart also offers discounts to teachers (an almost free desk copy) who use Hobart in the classroom. These all seem like smart ways to promote a magazine.
Moving poems is “an on-going anthology of the best videopoems, filmpoems, animated poems, and other poetry videos from around the web, appearing at a rate of one every weekday most weeks.” The poem below, “June,” by Dag T Straumsvag, was first published in Willow Springs 63, and was translated from Norwegian by Robert Hedin.
A new documentary – William S. Burroughs: A Man Within — is reviewed in the NYT today. From the review: “For those who celebrate Burroughs as one of the darkest and greatest of all comic artists, he is an extreme social satirist of Swiftian stature, whose quasi-pornographic images offer a stark, ghastly/funny photonegative image of the American body politic…. While burnishing the Burroughs mystique, ‘A Man Within’ assiduously tries to humanize an author whom it is all too easy to view as an avenging nihilist, a black hole of icy misanthropic contempt.” The above clip is Burroughs reading/reciting “A Thanksgiving Prayer.”
An article in New York Magazine called “James Frey’s Fiction Factory,” portrays Frey as “interested in conceiving commercial ideas that would sell extremely well. He was in the process of hiring writers—he said he’d already been to Princeton and was planning on recruiting from the other New York M.F.A. programs as well. We had probably heard of Jobie Hughes? Hughes was a former Columbia M.F.A. student who had graduated the previous spring. Frey told us that he and Hughes had sold the rights to an alien book they had co-written to Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. Before he left the classroom, Frey spelled out his e-mail and told us to get in touch if we had a good idea.”
Here are the terms, as reported in New York:
In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.
You really have to read the whole thing to believe it. And maybe not even then.
The emotions of writing a novel, the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the loathing for what you’ve written—I described it in my journal at one point as the diary of a man living on the ocean who has no idea what tides are. “Oh my God, the water’s going out! It’s a drought! Oh my God, the water’s’ coming in! It’s a flood!” I couldn’t believe how seriously I took this. With every book I would say, “If this is not the worst thing ever written….I need to just throw this away and start from scratch.” And then the next day, I would say, “I may be writing a new kind of literature here. There’s a very good chance that my grandchildren will have to study this book. I should put a little note in there for them.” The grandiosity was stunning, and the lows were stunning, too.
This is a fantastic essay on/review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, by Charles Baxter, in the New York Review of Books. Baxter’s clear prose and thinking on the book are a relief from all the other discussion surrounding Freedom‘s release, which may be interesting and useful, but doesn’t have much to do with the book itself. Baxter (and TNYRB) show the kind of careful, engaging thought and analysis so rarely seen in reviews or critical response to fiction today. This reminds me of why Baxter’s Burning Down the House is one of my favorite books of essays on writing — weaving astute cultural observation and criticism with the elements of fiction and storytelling he examines, kicking the whole “Is fiction relevant?” question squarely in the ass, or, better, just showing over and over the irrelevance of that question.
Baxter’s Willow Springs interview from spring 2010 is here.
There’s very little to say about writing poetry that isn’t obvious. I thought about writing a book about writing poetry, but then I decided it’d be pretty thin. You’d think that after teaching workshops for over forty years, I’d have a lot of ideas about it. And I do have a lot of ideas, but mostly about rules to break. When I started teaching in the ‘60s, I used to tell students that the publication of poetry by big houses in New York was going to turn out to be a blip on the literary map. The future was like the past: small editions, small presses. I didn’t know I was going to be right, but that’s what I thought. Because originally what you had was a bunch of editors in New York who were willing to publish a cookbook so they could publish literature. Now you have editors who only want to publish cookbooks or romance novels, and they publish a book of poetry or a good book of fiction every once in a while so people won’t yell at them. It’s just a business for them.
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