by Claire Skinner
How hard it’s been, winter. Putting on our hats and coats and long-johns and gloves and scarves and mittens. Paying the heating bill. Slipping on black ice. Trudging to work before the half-hearted sun comes up. Of course, there have been some pleasures (full moons over snow, red wine), but, by March, aren’t we through with all that? Aren’t we ready for something else entirely: some softening, some respite, some real warmth?
“I’m very slow when it comes to taking in content. I’ll find a writer I like, usually someone who is dead because their books are used and cheap, and then I’m very loyal to them, re-reading, searching for more of their work, hijacking their style for a few months or years. In Stockholm there are a few good places to find used books in English. Larry’s Corner, where I have a little office in the back. Alpha Books near the city center and lots of the thrift stores. One nice thing about looking for English books in a foreign country is that you’re forced to read what is there and go outside of your snobby box a bit.”
HBO’s Enlightened is on the chopping block. Despite a flood of Emmy nominations and critical praise, the series has not garnered the viewership it needs to be safe from cancellation.
by Greg Schutz
Thomas Jefferson, remix artist? Well, yes. Fragmentation and recombination are natural features—and unavoidable consequences—of language use, and the Declaration of Independence is a remarkable remix of ideas, a crosshatch of interconnected and often competing influences. What might an investigation of the Declaration tell us about the internet, Reality Hunger, and collage as a literary form?
An Aggregated Equality Read More »
by Greg Schutz
“Character is action.” “You are what you do.” These adages are behaviorist: they imply that identity is reducible to externally observable data. They argue that the question of who we are—always the topic, in some sense, of literary fiction—is answerable in terms of the impact our actions have on the world around us. Like the ubiquitous Show, don’t tell, they take a common problem and offers an overcorrection. They advise us to steer into the skid of interiority, bringing the story out of a character’s mind and into the external narrative world. Furthermore, such thinking is corrosive to the very moments in literature I find most compelling, moving, and meaningful. They repress the particular species of felt experience I hunger for as a reader, and which I seek to capture in my own work.
You Are How You Think Read More »
I feel grateful to Northern Illinois University Press for publishing Something That Feels Like Truth by Donald Lystra. It is a book that deserves an audience, even in a time when we are uncertain who might comprise an audience for well written, passionate fiction.
Ahem, dear National Book Foundation… Read More »
by Virginia Konchan
One must soberly ask, in light of the enthusiastic rhetoric that surrounds new forms of postmodern audience participation: are these forms of “agency” designed to empower the listener, creatively or critically, or merely offer the simulated (“technical”) illusion thereof? The mimetic replication of urban and post-industrial noises reinscribes the very determinisms that all art forms both inherit and strive to overcome, and while on a neurological level the ear enjoys assimilating unfamiliar sounds, and harsh noises generated from dissonance, punk, heavy metal or electronic music, can induce an “unpleasing” cerebral pleasure, the sustained withholding of aural pleasure from the listener may be the last insidiously lingering form of 21st century authoritarian “control” of all.
“A lot of poetry today gets by with flairs of language, or superficial risks. But it’s about sincerity – it’s the same for fiction. I always hope that writing better means living better. I think the genre distinctions between poetry and fiction have more to do with marketing than anything else.”
On “Paradise Hunger”: An Interview with Henry W. Leung Read More »
by Greg Schutz
According to the Weekly World News, I am writing on the verge of apocalypse and this blog post will never be read. The nineteenth of December: two days until we reach the terminus of the ancient Mayan calendar and find ourselves ushered into a future better left to the imagination of Roland Emmerich. Or Nancy Lieder. Or John of Patmos. Or whomever. Apocalypses come and go, and if some prophets, like the Revelator or Nostradamus, achieve a more lasting fame than others, it seems to have little to do with their accuracy as doomsayers. What’s worth noting about our latest onrushing apocalypse, however, is just how timely it seems.
by Claire Skinner
Above all else, a poem must be fun. Even poems that deal with decidedly not-fun topics (death, disaster, cruelty) must have elements of joy.
Fun. Not exactly a word thrown about in academic circles or in serious reviews of serious poetry. But, if a poem’s not fun, the likelihood of me finishing it (or enjoying it) are slim to none.
