Hi all,

I just received the following letter from Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden, and after corresponding with them a bit I will certainly be sending a few Cow Heavy titles their way, for inclusion in their exhibition and to find a permanent home afterward in a library in a country far, far away, which I think is awesome. Check them out for yourself, below. . . .

_______________

We would like to invite you to participate in an exhibition that would present independent US presses and their editions to the literary public, but also to translators, editors, critics, and literary scholars of Croatia and the neighboring region.

This exhibition (IamN – Izlozba americkih nakladnika / Exhibition of American Independent Presses) will be organized under the auspices of ZVONA i NARI (Bells & Pomegranates) Library and Literary Retreat, and curated by us, Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden.

ZVONA i NARI is a recently founded non-profit organization based in Liznjan, Croatia with a goal of promoting literary communication across the geographical borders (more information, albeit still only in Croatian, is available at www.zvonainari.hr). The two of us are writers, writing and publishing both in Croatian and English, graduates of Otis College’s MFA Writing Program (Los Angeles, CA), who have just earned a PhD in Literature at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH.

Having spent the better part of the past eight years in the US, we have become well acquainted with its literary scene, especially the independent one, and have for some time been aware of how little of that scene is noticed outside of the US borders. Unfortunately, the only literature that ever gets registered on an international scale is the one that gets picked up by commercial, corporate publishers, which, in our view, accounts for a very bland picture of what American literature is about.

Hence, by organizing this exhibition, we hope to offer local Croatian translators and publishers a deeper insight into current US literary trends and potentially establish new routes for literary dialogue and exchange. To participate in this exhibition all you have to do is send us at least one copy of each title you would like us to present. We encourage you to send primarily poetry and prose (meaning fiction and literature-oriented essays) of American writers. Please, accompany your books with any information you find relevant, either in regards to the authors or your press.

Depending on the number of books we receive for the  exhibition, by October 2011 we will compile both digital and print catalogues, we will present the exhibition to the general public in participating public libraries in Croatia as well as the region, and will keep the books at our library in Liznjan making them permanently accessible to translators, publishers, and literary scholars who will stay at our literary retreat.

Here we need to emphasize that programs organized by ZVONA i NARI are absolutely free to the public: writers, translators, editors, critics, indeed all active participants in the world of literature. In fact, should you or any of your authors want to visit us, we would be more than happy to present your press and your work. Unfortunately, at this time, we still have no means of covering our guests’ travel expenses – our retreat offers free accommodation and logistical support to visiting writers.

For further information, regarding the exhibition, our literary retreat, or any other matter, contact us at: zvonainari@zvonainari.hr or + 385 52 540 642.

_______________

You can send your entries for the exhibition to:

ZVONA i NARI

(for IamN)

Liznjan 840 B

52204 Liznjan

Croatia – Hrvatska

_______________

Should you decide to participate, do inform us of your decision by email so that we are aware of your entry, and that we are able to better organize our activities regarding the exhibition.

If, however, you find you have no interest in presenting your titles in this way or at this time, but have other projects we could help you with, please, remain in contact.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,

Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden

www.zvonainari.hr

Before I say anything else, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Chris Newgent for all of the time and energy he has put into our efforts to bring you the next nine words: WELCOME TO THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE LIT PUB! I’d like to also thank Matt Bell for his excellent advice during the early planning stages, and I especially need to thank my parents, without whose emotional and financial support this would never have been possible. A big round of applause for the guys and gal at Fuzzco, who helped make our website everything I hoped it could be. Many special words of gratitude to Lidia Yuknavitch, for believing in us before we even knew what we really were. And thank you also to Ethel Rohan, Mike Young, and Ofelia Hunt. Of course, gigantic hugs for the entire crew at TLP for all of their hard work and much-needed emotional support during these last few months (Mike Bushnell, thank you for listening, I am so grateful for your energy; Erika Moya, what would I do without you, seriously, my birthday twin!; Elizabeth Taddonio, you are going to manage the hell out of our community, I know it; Kristina Born, Mark Cugini, David Blomenberg, Nicelle Davis, Jacqueline Kari, Corey Beasley, Jordan Blum, M. M. Wittle, and Dave Kiefaber, I thank you for your belief in this; Richard Nash, Adam Robinson, Kevin Sampsell, Dan Wickett, Zach Dodson, and Michael Griffith, let me tell you how grateful I am for your guidance along the way). And thank you again and again and forever to my parents, who are really the unseen heros behind everything that we have accomplished thus far. Without them, I mean it, this would still be just an idea.

The Mimic’s Own Voice by Tom Williams

Main Street Rag, 97 pages, $9.95

This is a difficult book to write about because it’s so commandingly impressive. The writing is tight, expository, and emerges more from the school of “tell” than the school of “show.” I’m reminded most of Steven Milhauser’s story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” and novel Edwin Mullhouse. There is a narrator, but we are never sure who, or why, s/he is recounting the life and death of Williams’s protagonist, Douglas Myles, a mimic so good at replicating others’ voices he can even replicate voices he hasn’t heard — just by looking at the person. But how? How exactly does he do it? Questions like these seem the occasion for the academically toned narrative, which includes passages like:

Myles’s manuscript, housed now at The Pratt-Falls Center, Dr. Greene’s home institution, excited laymen and scholars at first, for all suspected it had been written for publication. Yet no contract exists among Myles’s papers (and, as the readers shall see, he was quite the saver), nor can one be found in the files of any publishers. This increased speculation that a bidding war for its rights would take place, though after the manuscript’s seventy-three handwritten pages were initially read, no offers, save for the Pratt-Falls’s were forthcoming. From its curious usage of second person, to its enigmatic opening and closing lines, ‘Your name is Douglas Myles. . . . They never really listened,” it does not divulge entirely his secrets, while it raises mysteries all its own. Still, there are a host of details which offer, for the first time, a definitive glimpse into his early life.

Subtle touches like “Pratt-Falls Center” make this novella an even more engaging read. The book is loaded with hidden gems like the detailed history of a richly imagined golden era of comics and Comedic Studies scholars, wherein a line like this rings true: “In her most formative study on the vernacular storytellers, Yokels, Yahoos and Just Plain Folks, the grand-dame of Comedic Studies, L.P. Chance, herself the graddaughter of ‘Lucky’ Chance, the ‘king of the zingers,’ tells the story of how Hezekiah ‘Uncle Ike’ Stanley, master of the farm to town narrative, clipped every positive review and stuffed them in a pillowcase he clutched at his side in bed.”

In this novella also exists social critics; the mysterious manuscript mentioned above (written in an oddly close-feeling yet distanced second person); a performance venue called The Hub, which “was as avant-garde as a middle-sized city in the Buckeye State could get,” and another venue called Either/Or, “where guitar and accordion punk combos performed side by side with latex lingerie shows.”

As Myles’s career prospects grow, as he makes his way toward top billing and to sold-out football stadiums, he remains the same man he’s always been — a complicatedly uncomplicated character. He is gentle, unassuming, and spends most of his time in this book either on stage, in the hearts and minds of others (colleagues, critics, fans), or giving his money to charity. A reviewer for Outsider Writers Collective observes:

Myles, for the most part [. . .] plays the idiot savant trope to a degree that steals much of the potential relatability. He may simply be too good, too likable. He is quiet, reserved, and infinitely humble, qualities that his comic brethren/competitors criticize constantly throughout the story, which forces these qualities to remain top-of-mind for the reader. We never see him angry. We never see him vengeful. But I suppose, who, if not a profession mimic, could at least feign contention so convincingly?

In the end, after watching this comedic genius rise to glory and then fall to earth (star that he was), I come away with a few different reactions: (1) awe and nostalgia for prose as strong and commanding as this; (2) sadness for this character, who ultimately misses his family, which is the beginning and end of his career; (3) interest in how this book’s narrative tone manages such a delicate balance between confession/personal revelation and dry, unemotional distance (perhaps helped by its mimicry of academic writing, so often focused on that holy trifecta of race, gender, and class).

There is so much to admire about this novella, about the writer behind it. I hope to read much more of Tom Williams in the years to come, and I am grateful that I was lucky enough to receive a copy of The Mimic’s Own Voice to read and enjoy, which I did, enthralled and thoroughly.

1.

First Impressions

This book is both less and more exciting to me than the others I’ve discussed here (The Artist’s Daughter and The Unbearable Heart). It is less exciting because it’s not as penetrable, but it is more exciting because of this — because, in fact, it’s even more fragmented, unruly, collaged, spontaneous, piece-y than Hahn’s other work. Billed as zuihitsu, this book is:

“list, diary, commentary, essay, poem. Fragment. [. . . It creates] a sense of disorder [. . .] by fragmenting, juxtaposing, contradicting, varying length or — even within a piece — topic. [. . . It is] e-mail, say. Gossip or scholarly notation. [. . . essays] closer to poetry.”

I love the freedom she creates for herself. I don’t love the overall effect, which is (for me) a loss of place and sense. Let me rephrase this: I feel lost inside this book. Without anchor. I feel as if I’m floating around, unable to recognize where I am. And I don’t like it.

2.

Kimiko Hahn and Carole Maso

This writing in this book reminds me of the writing in Carole Maso’s books. And it’s odd then that I have the same love/hate relationship to the work. I love the risks, the movement, the forward motion, the energy, the passion; I hate the fact that I can just as easily stop reading, that I never say to myself: Wow, I need to finish this book right now to (a) find out what happens, (b) keep basking in these sentences, (c) read more of these sentiments.

Hahn’s book, while more fragmented, is also more whole than the others I wrote about, which were collections of poems that often resonated along similar themes and figures. This one does the same, but in a disjointed way. Even the longer poems, made up of numbered sections, are out of order. On pages 52 and 53, the sequence goes: 1, 2, 3, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 28, 29, 31, 32. I hate it. These sections feel out of order. Yet I love it. The concept. The choice. The decision to do it. That it is done.

And so I know this must also be happening in Hahn’s writing, as it happens in Maso’s. Cixous, anyone?

3.

Kimiko Hahn and Rachel Blau duPlessis

Here is a moment from The Narrow Road from the Interior that I absolutely love (it’s long) from pp. 70-71:

“I love words that confuse –

how words can arouse. So the words are mine. The lover is mine. The lover’s attention is mine. I am powerful. The lover is powerful. The words themselves.

Mine – the noun and verb. That blur.

The blur where the skin feels prickly. Pleased and desirous. Delirious.

*

Is there a place in the English language for women? Yes and no. Yes, because women teach children language — even at this end of the century. And no, because men still own the means of production. But because culture is so incredibly susceptible to change the more women publicly use and abuse words — and its very syntax — the more women revise it in their own image.

Construct. Construe.

Perhaps diaries and letters are too feminine or female to become canon fodder.

In publication women come very close to owning their words though in that instant it becomes both the property of the capitalist and available within the market.

canon

cannon

cannot

I tell several female friends about this piece and only one does not change the subject.”

This reminds me of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s essay, “Breaking the Sentence; Breaking the Sequence,” in Writing Beyond the Ending. In it, she writes:

“The sentence broken is one that expresses ‘the ridicule, the censure, the assurance of inferiority’ about women’s cultural ineptitude and deficiencies. To break the sentence rejects not grammar especially, but rhythm, pace, flow, expression: the structuring of the female voice by the male voice, female tone and manner by male expectations, female writing by male emphasis, female writing by existing conventions of gender — in short, any way in which dominant structures, shape muted ones. For a woman to write, she must experiment with ‘altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it’.

[. . .] ‘woman’s sentence,’ then, has its basis not in biology, but rather in cultural fearlessness, in the attitude of critique — a dissent from, a self-conscious marking of, dominant statement” (pp. 32-33).

Some day, one day, I will be able to enter into this conversation — I will know my Cixous, my Woolf, my Maso, my duPlessis, and on and on. I will have something more useful to contribute than mere quotations. I will be more than a parrot. But for now, at least a connection has been made and filed away in the old brainbox.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Carole Maso, Kimiko Hahn, Rachel Blau du Plessis, The Narrow Road to the Interior, Virginia Woolf ]]> http://bigother.com/2011/04/30/kimiko-hahns-the-narrow-road-to-the-interior/feed/ 6 MoGa hahn http://bigother.com/2011/04/27/dont-return-to-a-man-out-of-loneliness-kimiko-hahns-the-artists-daughter/ http://bigother.com/2011/04/27/dont-return-to-a-man-out-of-loneliness-kimiko-hahns-the-artists-daughter/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:03:47 +0000 Molly Gaudry http://bigother.com/?p=18750 ]]>

I’ve written about Kimiko Hahn before for Big Other, but I couldn’t help but also write a little bit about this book, too, The Artist’s Daughter. Try this poem on for taste:

Not all insects but certain insects

spiral above bodies of water in their courtship,

the male carrying a stone fly or mayfly in his legs.

The female will follow him,

alighting on a petal or stem,

then accept the prey

and consume it during their consummation.

How pleasant,

though different from fellatio or kissing,

to eat, say, a square of bitter chocolate

filled with creamy nougat

while the male pulses inside.

How sweet.

How exquisite a bribe for the bride.

This poem is from page 70, and is #4 of Hahn’s “Reckless Sonnets.” I include it here because I love the blend of sex and violence, nature and sensory detail. The poem is sexy. Dark. Makes me want chocolate. 

The rest of the book is no less sexy throughout. For example:

The silkworm moth possesses no special designation

apart from its renowned larvae treasured for two millennia.

And ten days after the cocoon is spun

the farmer’s wife gathers twenty-five thousand for a pound of silk,

drops them in hot water to soften the gummy threads, and kill

the chrysalid. The parents have no separate

nomenclature and no mouths and do not eat

in their three-day existence laying four hundred eggs.

Across my bed I flare open a sheet,

woven from caterpillar spit,

for a lover. For saliva, blood and come.

For two to three days of anonymous flight.

For the sensation that this match will last hundreds of years;

that it will end after a moment, wing-torn and starved.

I find myself more and more interested in lineation, after reading Hahn. Her lines make sense to me. These poems could be written as prose, but they seem to make sense lineated as well. It’s been a particular struggle of mine lately, trying to understand how lineation isn’t arbitrary when not formally imposed, or even when it is. In any case, I’m also in awe of how Hahn writes about so many themes but keeps them all so tightly controlled. Sex. Violence. Nature.

But also fairy tale. . . .

Lines like: “the grandmother remains dead / not hibernating in a wolf’s belly” (p. 15), “The bread. The furnace. We walk home / with pockets full of frightful gold” and “Elbows confess to splinters from the windowsill. / The daughter’s yellow hair will become a golden ladder. / As she twirls around her skirt swirls up” (p. 41).

And also, the death of her mother:

“It’s a month from the ninth anniversary of my mother’s death and we still can’t think of a place to set or release her ashes. My own — maybe off the Brooklyn Bridge except it’s so windy. What a thing to wish on anyone — a face full of ashes” (p. 26).

And this one, below, also about her mother. (I’ll end after section one, because I love this advice. I wish someone had told me this advice. I wish, even if someone had, I would have had the sense to follow it. Even though I know it now, I may never follow it. My burden, perhaps.)

When I think of mother when

I was thirteen I think

of a figure so despondent – 

her word –

as she stood at the stove

you could look through her back

to the pot on the burner,

pass your hand 

through her torso.

You could not look into her face,

it was so turned

from light and people.

If only someone had asked her what she wanted,

it was bound to be small.

A wisteria vine. Ten days

in Kyoto. A kiln. 

And now she is gone

so I cannot ask her 

if I am right about this

though when I cannot turn

my own face to the sun

I feel I am suddenly her, slight,

sinewy and clear,

telling me the only advice

she ever bestowed:

don’t return to a man out of loneliness.

The Source by Noah Eli Gordon, 144 Pages, 6 X 8, $16.00

1.

WTF is The Source?

The Source celebrates both prostitution and the life of letters. It is a touch sadomasochistic because it suffers a sense of its own belatedness, hates fussing with nature, and would like the world to be all weeds. Some think it the forerunner of what may be the international style of the coming decade, because it is secretive but hides nothing, requires an all-inclusive symbolism to determine its interpretations, while paying little attention to the complexity of mixed reverie and memory.

The poem above (from p. 9) is one of my favorite answers to the question WTF is the Source? For fun, let’s consult page 26 and see what we find there:

The source is respectful of tradition, yet grounded in the assertion that it speaks many vows with many voices, turning an actual image into an illusory one by thinking to assist the sun in performing its daily journey across the sky.

When the Source is formed and expressed in words, writing, it is true, has shaped it, but the spirit of the Source — the creative urge it represents, the feeling it expresses and evokes, and even in large part its subject matter, comes from only two words: ‘is’ and ‘are.’

Thus, our solar system spirals into a higher orbital frequency, and there is no more of the babble we’ve loved and counted among our blessings.

Part of the project of The Source is to define “the Source” by the time the book is done. At the end, this is what we are presented with:

I have come only to give you, if I can, a more vivid conception of why an intensive study of the Source will not be undertaken for the sake of seeming to undertake it. In its simplicity of overt action and complexity of unknown processes and relationships, a jump out of the classroom window mirrors its basic theme. The object would be to make it a pure art, like staring at a transmitter.

Let me begin again and appeal to you in the name of a small bird, a roach, a flower even, which might fairly say that the world is not its friend but a symbolic arena for social competition, one openly brutal or completely indifferent. Either way, the chief advantage of being human somehow makes it from one side of the wall to the other.

And that’s the end. A re-beginning. But these are interesting excerpts, to me at least, because when I read this book these are the first pages I read. I flipped through and found myself on page 9 first, then went to page 26, and then went to the end. My reasons for doing this probably had something to do with having read Noah Eli Gordon’s Note on Process first. More on this in the next section. . . .

2.

WTF is Conceptual Writing?

Watch this first, seriously! Then check out Conjunctions for examples of poems found in The Source. And also consult Kenneth Goldsmith’s thoughts on conceptual writing. Where The Source is concerned, re: conceptual writing, here are excerpts from Noah Eli Gordon’s Note on Process:

From January of 2008 to September of 2009, I read only page 26 of nearly ten thousand books at the Denver Public Library, culling from them bits of language, which I then fused together, altering some nouns to read ‘the Source’ so they become reflective of the parameters of the project. . . . I undertook this project in order to investigate whether or not constraint-based, conceptual writing might have a spiritual dimension. It is now my belief that rigid and systemic modes of writing can embody an emotionally charged engagement with the world.

This helped me. I mean, as I was reading this book, I knew then that the prose blocks are collaged bits of found fragments, sentences, words, from all those books Gordon picked up at the library for over a year. I like the idea of searching for spirituality on page 26 of thousands of books. I especially like his explanation for why page 26:

The choice of page 26, while obviously corresponding to the amount of letters present in the English alphabet, is also important in Kabbalist terms; it represents the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that form the name of God. Additionally, according to the Talmud, the Torah would have been revealed during the 26th generation of the history of the world; thus, it is Moses who, 26 generations after Adam, receives the Torah transmitted by God.

Pretty cool, right? Made me rethink the value of the number 26. Made me feel odd and slightly floaty as I read the poems, knowing they were created from so many pages and all those pages numbered 26.

3.

WTF do I do with The Source?

I don’t know, exactly. The pleasures of reading this are not quite like the pleasures of reading, say, a novel about four sisters, or dragons, or vampires. Instead, the pleasure is in wondering what words came from where, how, and why they were placed together just so. The pleasure is in slowly reading and gaining a more thorough understanding of the definition(s) of the Source.

I think, ultimately, I am interested in the idea of using the book as a way to start a conversation in a poetry class, a way to ask students “What is poetry? What is a poem?” I can imagine having great conversations about these questions in either a 4th grade class or a graduate seminar. It would be fun to then give the students the exercise to pick a number, go to the library, and create poems by culling and compiling text from those page numbers.

Conceptually, it’s such a cool idea, and at the sentence level, there are many pleasures to be discovered on the book’s many pages. I think these are valuable lessons for students of poetry, at any level. To learn that they are free, they can take concepts and ideas and go crazy with them, can make lovely words and sounds and images and sentences and poems from the words and sounds and images and sentences that surround them in their own libraries in their own cities in their own schools. And ultimately, what I love about this book is that it seems to me to be an ode to libraries, about the wonders that exist in them, in the books that live in them.

* * * UPDATE * * *

HTML Giant contributor Nat Otting informed me that over on the Futurepoem blog, “Futurepost,” 26 librarians (or archivists), who are poets or writers or artists, are currently responding to The Source. Today, Jessica Grim responds with a poem of her own from page 26 of books found in the Oberlin Library. Previously, Patrick James Dunagan wrote one of his own from page 26 of books found in Gleeson Library-Geshcke Center University of San Francisco. Subscribe to the Futurepost feed so you can keep up with the latest from Futurepoem!

I even sometimes fantasize about wanting to write them.

Now, let me clarify: I really only like the ones about neurotic career gals living in New York City, usually in their late twenties or early thirties, who keep fucking up and self-sabotaging their love lives. (Meanwhile, of course, their careers are on the right track, even if those careers are making them miserable.)

Why do I like these New York Times bestsellers? These newspaper-print $7.99 books blurbed by Entertainment Weekly and Glamour? Because they’re fun and light and easy . . . but, sometimes, I really hate the fact that I read (I mean buy) these books. And Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed is no exception.

The #1 Reason I Hate This Book

I’m just going to come out and say it: This book is anti-gay.

I mean, forget about all the hetero-normative societal conventions and stereotypes that the entire book is based on, to start with, and just go with this:

p. 53: “Annalise was upset too, for her own reasons. ‘How come you two get to be twins and I’m left out? My bag is gay.’”

Context: 30-year old narrator, Rachel, is remembering how she and her best friend, Darcy, wound up with the same backpacks on the first day of fourth grade. This book’s copyright is 2004, so let’s assume Rachel is 30 years old in 2004. Fourth graders tend to be nine or ten years old. Let’s make her ten for easier math. 2004 minus twenty years = 1984. People were not using the word “gay” as an insult in 1984. Google search results say this phenomenon cropped up post-2008. So not only is this a glaring error, it’s just tacky and insensitive and gross.
The #2 Reason I Hate This Book

p. 74: “‘All right then. I’ll wing it,’ he says, flashing me his ‘I never skipped a night wearing my retainer’ smile.

Ha. It’s terrible.

(So terrible it’s awesome? Yes. So, to clarify: because I will never allow myself to write a line as awesome as this, I hate this book.)

The #3 Reason I Hate This Book

p. 129: “Darcy and I had been friends forever, but I think it was the first time that I realized the influence I have over her. I picked her wedding dress, the most important garment that she will ever wear.”

Ridiculous.

(But this book knows it. And does not care. And because I am probably the only person on the planet who cares about how this book does not care, I hate this book. Fuck wedding dresses, that’s what I say.)

The #4 Reason I Hate This Book

p. 270: Darcy “takes a bite and continues to talk with her mouth full. ‘I’m not dyking out or anything. I’m just saying you really are always here for me.’”

Seriously? (See #1.)

The #5 Reason I Hate This Book

Darcy hits on this guy Ethan, who rejects her, and from that point forward in her mind he’s gay–”it must be the only explanation” (p. 324).

Right.

Okay, some might argue that Darcy, the character we’re not supposed to like very much, is the gay-hating racist (yes, racist. See #6). Some might argue that she is these things because she’s the bad guy in this book. But this isn’t really the case. First, Rachel never calls her out. Nobody ever does. And, second, the author, Emily Giffin, wrote a sequel, Something Blue, which provides Darcy’s side of the story (how her backstabbing maid of honor, Rachel, stole her fiance). What this means is Darcy, in the end, is supposed to be likable, the victim of her best friend’s treachery. But this doesn’t change the fact that she hates gays (See #1 and #4) and is racist (See #6).

The #6 Reason I Hate This Book

p. 282: “‘She doesn’t speak English very well. She just kept saying that she ‘didn’t see no ring.’” Darcy imitates the maid’s accent. ‘I even took the phone. I told her I would give her a big, big reward if she finds it. The bitch isn’t stupid. She knows that two carats are worth about twenty million dirty toilets.’”

The only people of color in this book are maids and doormen.

But at least Rachel’s doorman, Jose, speaks English. For all the good it does anyone. The guy’s so stupid he–SPOILER ALERT–lets Darcy go up to Rachel’s apartment even though Darcy’s fiance, Dex, is upstairs in Rachel’s apartment, because Dex and Rachel have been having an affair behind Darcy’s back all summer long. Jose, who, all along seems to get it, apparently fucks it all up for everyone at the end of the book. Thanks a lot, Jose.

The #7 Reason I Hate This Book

Can you believe it? It’s a movie! Starring Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, and John Krasinski. I feel like, you know, only shitbooks like this get made into movies starring Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, and John Krasinski.

(Will I see it? You know it. Just as soon as it’s on-demand at Netflix. For the record, I hate this book.)

The #8 Reason I Hate This Book

If I cared more, this would be potentially interesting: Jose’s character doesn’t make the cut for the film version.

The #9 Reason I Hate This Book

Someone out there is probably thinking: Why is this bitch taking this so seriously? To this person, I say: You’re probably missing the point of this post.

The #10 Reason I Hate This Book

I’m going to get hate mail over this post. I know it.

(And when I do, I’m going to post it here publicly.)

* * * UPDATE / CORRECTION * * *

Using the word “gay” as an insult was, in fact, common practice in the ’80s. According to the first result that pops up in the Google search that I linked (this BBC article), “By the 1980s it was finding its way into schools as a playground insult.”

So, I eat my words.

Way to be historically accurate!

Guess I’m the asshole!

See Fanny Howe above.

Read more about her here.

Find out more about 1913 Press here.

And get the full contest details here.

Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, Pilgrims: A Love Story is a book I’ve had on my stack for far too long. I bought it because of the cover. I wanted to know what this car had to do with anything. I bought it because Black Lawrence Press is an imprint of Dzanc. I bought it because I like a lot of the writers that come out of Alabama’s MFA program and so I thought I’d take a chance on T. J. Beitelman. And I’m glad I did. This book is about one of my favorite writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and one of my favorite dreamboats, Jude Law. Someone should make this book into a short film. Man, I’d love to see this on screen.

Here is one of the early poems in the book, “The Inciting Incident,” which introduces the two to one another:

Scene: Arc d’ Triumph. Jude Law meets Gabriel

Garcia Marquez, calls him Gabo.

Marquez slaps the boy and calls him puta,

Bitch, and they are instantly transported

To a deserted island where they must listen

To evangelists until they repent and kiss

On the lips. A stand-off for months. Then the rainy season.

The droplets, open mouths. The two men kiss like dust.

After this, they journey to Cuba, to the “borderland between the Nogales in Mexico and the one in Arizona,” all over the desert, and to Tucson, where they share “the same thought: / The world is brown. Dusty. Forsaken,” to a Denny’s in Casa Grande, to Mexico City, to wherever there are “Elvises, / thousands of them, / small-time Shivas / in white leather,” and on and on, the two of them each “wanderers of nothing / but the resolute world,” and then they are briefly separated and when they come together again things are different, to the extent that Jude calls Garcia Marquez “Sensei” from that point forward, because he “knows / To call him something new,” and then finally there is nothing left but for Jude, alone, to sit “cross-legged / To face the god / Who would make a world / So big and beige and plain.”

These poems are lovely; the bigger story is a joy to travel through; the characters are convincing and fun to see together; and ultimately, my only complaint is that this book isn’t three or four times longer. I feel I could read so much more about these two; I wish there were 30 more poems in the middle. I wish I could spend more time with Gabo and Jude. I wish they met a few more “characters” on their travels because I was just not even close to ready to put this book down after only 40 pages.

So, here’s to reading more of Beitelman in the future. Because I know I will. And you should, too.