June 6, 2013 On Poetry Henry Doesn’t Have Any Bats By Catherine Lacey My poetry shelf is slim but holds the most thumbed book I own: John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and, until recently, I would read several songs a week, rereading my favorites as if they held some kind of clue. I read them to cheer myself or wallow. I read them aloud, alone and to other people. Some nights after having wine, I’d read the meanest, strangest ones aloud. When I found a copy in a bookstore, I’d open to a favorite and hand it to someone. Even his darkest, most dire, most hopeless songs soothe me. Lines worm in me for weeks. It’s not that I think Berryman is the most talented writer or that he has written the most important poems or that his work has reached some aesthetic pinnacle or that I have nothing better to read. All of those things are untrue, and yet I am compelled to read his work in a way I am not often compelled by anyone else’s work. I am still trying to understand why. Nearly a decade ago, I almost made myself sick on them during a New Orleans summer. While hurricanes spun toward us from the gulf, dire conversations at the grocery store blended into my Dream Song summer like milk poured into milk. A note signed J.B. at the front of the book: The poem then … is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age … who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second. Read More
June 6, 2013 Quote Unquote Enttäuschung By Sadie Stein “In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.” ―Thomas Mann
June 6, 2013 Fiction 1 Story of God: 71 By Joy Williams Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we will be running a series of pieces from Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. First published in The Paris Review in 1968, Joy Williams has since appeared in our pages many times. 99 Stories of God is her first book of fiction in nearly a decade and was written, she has said, partly in an attempt to imitate the inimitable Thomas Bernhard, that “cranky genius of Austrian literature,” and his The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories. 71 A child was walking with a lion through a great fog. “I’ve experienced death many times,” the lion said. “Impossible,” the child said. “It’s true, my experience of death does not include my own.” “I’m glad.” “I’ve had near-death experiences, however.” “Quite a different matter,” the child said. Read More
June 6, 2013 On the Shelf Joyce Carol Oates Gives Questionable Advice, and Other News By Sadie Stein “If you want to get the news from poems, you’ve come to the right place.” That would be the Boston Review. So much for reading being its own reward. This principal eats worms when his students meet reading goals. Mandarin: a language uniquely well-suited to punning. First-edition book clubs are, apparently, a thing. In the words of one friend, “We live in a sad and awesome time.” “As an author with a half century of literary success behind me, I can assure you the only way to make it in this industry is to meet as many publishers as you possibly can and then fuck them.” Joyce Carol Oates, meet The Onion.
June 5, 2013 At Work Pinning Down: A Conversation with Catrin Morgan By Daisy Atterbury Air dies elsewhere, graphite on paper, 10 cm x 10 cm. Catrin Morgan has a history of sticking pins through words. (Check out her ongoing project, Pinning, which was installed at the Bromley House Library.) Maybe this is her real attraction to Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, which she just illustrated for Granta’s new edition: finally, a book with text she can’t easily pin down. In graphite drawings, Morgan builds disassembled—or, nonrationally assembled—architectural objects, maps, and containers, many of which seem to act as entry points to systems with unfamiliar parameters. The illustrations define and rely on their own language, complementing the language of The Age of Wire and String nicely, self-contained discourses with overlapping vocabularies. Your designs for The Age of Wire and String are almost all diagrams, fanciful maps or systems that have some kind of chronological or other organizational logic. Can you explain how the content and structure of the book informed your decisions here? It seemed to me that by attempting to illustrate The Age of Wire and String directly, by illustrating very faithfully the images suggested by the text, I would close it down. What I love about The Age of Wire and String is the space it opens up in my imagination and I didn’t want my images to take that space away from new readers. In the end, the images I created aimed to respond to the tone and construction of the text and to behave in a similar way. The text subverts our expectations of familiar patterns of language, and so I created images that appear familiar but in fact are always doing something that belies their appearance, so what appears to be a map is in fact composed of sleeping figures, and a circuit diagram is based on the floor plans of a building. The images also reference directly illustrations from manuals and encyclopedias, as I felt like the deadpan tone of this kind of illustration suited perfectly the tone of the novel. The set of illustrations I ended up with are a representation of the world that The Age of Wire and String projects within my mind, and some of them were created without planning exactly where they would go in the text. When placing them I looked for shared co-ordinates between an image and a piece of text, so that the image and text spoke to, but did not explain each other. Read More
June 5, 2013 Arts & Culture The Town of Books By Sadie Stein Hay-on-Wye, Wales, has a population of 1,500 and thirty secondhand bookstores. Since the 1960s, the town has taken in discarded tomes from across the anglophone world, and is known as “the town of books.” Appropriately enough, it’s also home to the annual Hay Festival, described by USA Today as “a geographically remote, bohemian version of the World Economic Forum’s Davos event.” Kindles, needless to say, are frowned upon.