And if you have a blog, spread the news! Let’s get these authors some eyeballs.

I’m not going to name the journal, let alone the editor, but the most recent case of this happening earned me the following: “One of the reasons I passed on your story was I thought it was a bit too long. And not just for our mag, but for what it was doing.”

Now, I could list out the reasons why this irritates me. I could find fault with it’s logic. I could recuse its author. I could continue my tantrum. But all that is sheer defensiveness. What I’m interested in here is the pain. Are there any criticisms you’ve received from editors (or anyone, really) that have stuck around beyond their usefulness, causing irritation, anxiety, or dismay? Maybe if you gave voice to them here, you could set yourself free.

Ariel Basom took this with his cell phone, put the result through a filter, and came up with what seems to be a kind of eerie, Lynchian singles ad:

Matthew Simmons snuggles with his cat Emmett at the end of his video, and I can’t help but feel a vicarious comfort:

Maxfield Chandler lends his sad eyes to this reading, and the abstract background appears thought-like:

Mel Bosworth’s calm during his reading seems unsettling, as if he’s expressing some kind of condolence:

And compare Mel’s “Fatness” to Eric Leuschner’s, which robs the poem of any sentimental chords, switching sadness for bathos:

Paula Bomer had her reading recorded by a hand-held camera, and the result is a strange outtake from COPS, complete with a villain in fur to read the ransom note:

James J. Williams III thought for some reason that Philip Seymore Hoffman’s drag queen from Flawless ought to weigh in:

Ryan W. Bradley adds atmospherics to his reading, and obscures his face in a way that suggests testimony or alien abduction:

Daniel Coughlin describes his acrobatic video as “A metaphoric (re)birth”:

BL Pawelek gives a gravelly, weary voice to a harsh chiaroscuro, forefronting a chosen image from the poem:

Tan-ya Gerrodette uses the shoreline in an entirely different way for her video, and her voice-over adds an interesting anxiety:

I love the ambient insect and bird noises that give Greg Olear’s reading a kind of cozy, homespun feeling:

Zac Whittenburg defamiliarizes body parts to create an abstract composition that evokes the broken utility of the poem’s language:

AD Jameson throws himself at a playfully counterintuitive grift on his poem’s central image:

Stephen Johnson talked his yoga class into the service of his video, bringing community to the poem’s intimate dialog:

Todd Zuniga makes fun of me a little, which certainly touches on one of the central elements of the collection as a whole:

As these continue to come in (a few more are expected this coming week), I’ve come to see them as a kind of communion between myself and the reader, a shared experience in a way, that instead of reducing the work, expands it beyond what I alone could have managed. You can see these poems and more at my YouTube Channel.

Name this contemporary author.

As for the second duty, I point you to the very first sentence of Madera’s column, where the following words appear: “the pronounced lack of ambition and its concomitant general distrust of virtuosity in the contemporary arts scene.” Ambition is an interesting concept with regard to art. In the context of literature, I often hear it within with a conversation about the sheer length of a work. (That, or used disparagingly to mark an author’s distasteful self-promotion.)

Of course, artistic ambition is more than a matter of size.

If I were AD Jameson, I’d trace the evolution of popular perceptions thereof from Ancient Greece through Marvel comics. But I’m not AD Jameson. Instead I simply want to know who, among contemporary writers–among people published in the journals you edit or read–you think of as most ambitious? Feel free to add a couple lines of explanation vis a vis the nature of their ambition, or of ambition in general. But mostly I want names. Who are the ambitious contemporary writers?

Finally, do you feel like your own work is “ambitious?” Is this something you see as a reasonable thing to think about when making art? Or is it something for the critics to discuss, something assigned to you after the fact.

The Deets:

Friday, April 30 at 7pm at Bluestockings, 72 Allen Street, New York, NY.

Kate’s novel is an American triptych inspired by Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” also a grotesque homage to Mrs. Dalloway. She writes the blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister, which will inspire a collection of essays to be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2011. She is also an editor at Nightboat Books.

Here’s a blurb from one of our favorite former Big Other contributors:

“Haunting and visionary, Kate Zambreno’s O FALLEN ANGEL examines the suburban family with ruthless elegance. Here is a novel, done and undone, a brazen mirror reflecting the 21st century.”
—Lily Hoang

I just saw that in addition to the great cross-genre lineup, they’ve added a way for the audience to get more involved–to actually read beside the authors on stage. This is a pretty neat opportunity. Basically, they’ve got “an ask.” Use a line from Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask as a jumping off point, and write a 300 word story. Send the result in to rozalia@therumpus.net, and get a chance of being 1 of 4 readers invited to the stage.

This is something all us NYC folks should do. Big Other represent! Here are the details.

I must say that this is an event you have to pay for. It is ten dollars. But that’s kind of worth it, don’t you think? It’s totally worth it.

UPDATE:

They just posted about offering a 4$ discount for anyone who tweets, blogs or Facebooks about the event. Read the offer.