"The pairing of these things, the genuine jouissance and the relentless critical awareness, the ruthless crusade against the conventionally obvious, is what makes it all work."

"Part of the aversion to theory, as far as I can tell, comes from the mistaken assumption that the genre we call theory should be read differently than the genres we call fiction or poetry, because it’s “critical” rather than “creative.” On the contrary, I think it’s quite productive to read theory as if it were poetry or fiction, which is to say as if its primary function was to affect rather than educate."

"The man could not shave himself. In lieu of a belt, he knotted a rope or a discarded necktie around his waist. Mornings, he needed two or three ounces of gin in his orange juice if he was to steady his hand to eat the breakfast that would very likely prove his only meal of the day. Thereafter a diminishing yellow tint in the glass might belie the fact that now he was drinking the gin neat, which he did for as many hours as it took him to. Ultimately he would collapse — sometimes sensible enough of his condition to lurch toward a bed, though more often he would crash down into a chair, and once it was across my phonograph."

"The basic rule you gave us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from writer to reader and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, you said, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and technique at all—so long as it was effective."

[...]

"You said, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."

"Samuel Beckett, born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906, was a native English speaker. However, in 1946 Beckett decided that he would begin writing exclusively in French. After composing the first draft in his second language, he would then translate these words back into English. This difficult constraint – forcing himself to consciously unpack his own sentences – led to a burst of genius, as many of Beckett’s most famous works (Malloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, etc.) were written during this period. When asked why he wrote first in French, Beckett said it made it easier for him to “write without style.”

"Beckett would later expand on these comments, noting that his use of French prevented him from slipping into his usual writerly habits, those crutches of style that snuck into his English prose. Instead of relying on the first word that leapt into consciousness – that most automatic of associations – he was forced by his second language to reflect on what he actually wanted to express. His diction became more intentional."

"It's time we thought about leaving the body behind."

"Like most literary geeks, I’ve read a lot of Jorge Luis Borges. If you haven’t, look into the influences of your favorite writers, and you may find the Argentine short-story craftsman appearing with Beatles-like frequency. Indeed, Borges’ body of work radiates inspiration far beyond the realm of the short story, and even beyond literature as commonly practiced. Creators from David Foster Wallace to Alex Cox to W.G. Sebald to the Firesign Theater have all, from their various places on the cultural landscape, freely admitted their Borgesian leanings. That Borges’ stories — or, in the more-encompassing term adherents prefer to use, his “fictions” — continue to provide so much fuel to so many imaginations outside his time and tradition speaks to their simultaneous intellectual richness and basic, precognitive impact. Perhaps “The Garden of Forking Paths” or “The Aleph” haven’t had that impact on you, but they’ve surely had it on an artist you enjoy."

"For Christ sake write and don't worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material (as we say at Yale)."

"So I don’t know how the brain makes stories, but it must have to do with deep memories or deep symbols. Certainly when I was writing The Middle Stories there was no conscious deliberation — it was just one sentence following rather quickly on the heels of the previous sentence. I was trying to write as quickly as possible at the time, like to make myself into a kind of writing machine, where I was at once very alert and very exact, trying to write these stories that would come out perfectly, and which I wouldn’t have to edit. So I was training myself to do what felt right in each moment. In some way, it felt like dancing. There’s brain-thought when you’re dancing, but mostly it’s in your body — your body decides your next move. In the case of writing, I think it’s as much in the fingers as in the head. Maybe the fingers get you deeper than the brain does."

"My second book is called Angle of Yaw. It’s concerned, roughly speaking, with the commercialization of public space and speech. I’m also interested in the ways that technologies of viewing — aerial photography in particular — replace the God-term with a camera that feeds our spectacular culture an image of itself. This is, of course, a famous idea. The air war, the flight simulator, the crop circle, space travel, the marching band forming a flag at halftime for the omniscient Goodyear blimp — such ideologically rich phenomena recur throughout the book. Maybe their recurrence imposes an order on the poems ironically homologous to the cosmetic order such forms aspire to impose on us? Images bundled into experience, fascia... Anyway, if there is innovation in the book, it’s not primarily philosophical."

"A lot of the most beautiful moments in the arts do come at the breaking point of the medium. Sometimes the most moving moment when someone is speaking or singing is when their voice cracks with emotion or they can't go on.

"When someone reaches the limit of the power of the medium, that's when they start to signify this thing that exceeds the medium. It's a way of making us feel what's not sayable, what's inexpressible. That's how you say what can't be said."

"It was Rich’s voice—analytic, passionate, radical, ferocious, yet never merely fervent—that I wanted to hear in the midst of today’s tedious and all too familiar debates about women’s rights. Rich’s death leaves a hole in the culture that can’t be easily filled. The generation of feminist intellectuals who helped usher in the changed world we live in will soon be gone; there’s something lonely about that, I think. To be reminded of just how much the world has changed since Rich’s youth, you might reread Robert Lowell’s (very nice) review of her fourth book in the New York Times, which aptly but rather awfully describes reading her work as “watching the terrible and only abstractly imaginable struggle of a beetle to get out of its beetle shell while remaining a beetle.” In those days, she was what they called a “woman poet.”"

"This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoken words on the page with considerable misgivings . . . indeed, what follows can be considered an interview conducted with himself, by himself."

"Ariana Reines, now thirty, has a curriculum vitae that could make her look like a star of academia. She graduated summa cum laude from Barnard and then studied with the most rarefied, radical philosophers and literary theorists at Columbia and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has translated two books from the French for Semiotext(e), as well as Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare for her own tiny Mal-O-Mar press. She was the 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry (the youngest ever) at UC Berkeley. Her first book of poems was The Cow (2006), followed by the two reviewed here, and she’s the author of a play, TELEPHONE (inspired by Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book’s extravagantly difficult, graphic extrapolation from telephone technology into schizophrenia and culture), the production of which play awed reviewers and won two Obies in 2009. Reines is interested in and has studied performance, and is an irresistible, waifish, wisecracking public impresario of her poems. She’s discussed endlessly on the Web. Whatever all that might suggest, her heart truly is in the gutter with the filthy and distraught and impossible and she’s one notch above a bag lady herself, literally. She is about nothing but poetry—poetry and decency (though possibly in that order)."

"We find ourselves not by turning inward toward what we imagine is inside us, but by the act of looking outward at the world. The self is nothing without what it looks at. On its own, it’s inert. Kick it. Poke it. It seems dead. But point it at something else — Doritos, lawn darts, abandoned mines in Upper Michigan, a cappella groups, Dungeons & Dragons — and it perks up. Thus a focus on our obsessions, however nerdy, creepy, lovely, allows the self to emerge and live and blink a little in the bright light. In other words, the best way to write about ourselves is to write about something specific in the world. We don’t write about ourselves. We write ourselves."

"I went through a difficult breakup and was extremely lonely. I posted a flyer in NYC that said, "Call me. (347) 469-3173". People took pictures of my flyer and put it on the net. I've received over 60,000 calls and texts. Met amazing people all over the world. People say to me all the time, "So you're not lonely anymore?" I am less lonely. This crazy idea actually worked. This blog consists of some of these conversations."

The writers John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead) and Geoff Dyer (Zona) recently met up in New York to discuss writing, Raising Arizona, and self-indulgence. The following is an edited transcript of their talk at 192 Books.

"Walser’s entire work, including his ambiguous silence of twenty-eight years, is a commentary on the vanity of all initiative, the vanity of life itself. Perhaps that is why he only wanted to be a walking nobody. Someone has compared Walser to a long-distance runner who is on the verge of reaching the longed-for finishing-line and stops in surprise, looks round at masters and fellow disciples, and abandons the race, that is to say remains in what is familiar, in an aesthetics of bewilderment. Walser reminds me of Pique mal, a curious sprinter, a cyclist in the sixties who suffered from mood swings and would sometimes forget to finish a race."

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:

A couple of weeks ago I spoke with Geoff Dyer on the phone about—well, what, exactly? The idea was to discuss his new book, Zona, but we ended up drifting over so many other topics that I never even bothered to ask him why he wanted to write about Tarkovsky’s The Stalker in the first place. Before the actual interview began we chatted about his review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: the Biography, and by the end he was giving me advice about which David Markson book I should read first. Our interview, in other words, assumed the shape of a Geoff Dyer book. But even though we never made it to Zona, we still managed to discuss some of its major themes: the war against genre, literary failure, artistic commentary. Not to mention our mutual hatred of seafood.

Dyer, who based the book on a movie about a journey, molds this idea into the central theme of his newest work, taking the reader on a "journey" through his mind, his past, and, ultimately, what it means to be human. We caught up with him shortly before the book's release.

Ben Lerner and Cyrus Console grew up together in Topeka, Kansas, and became poets. Here the two friends discuss their boyhood bedsheets, corn and irony, fundamentalism and pharmaceuticals, how they came to use words like “metonymic,” “horizontality,” and “syntagmatic,” and why they are in the habit of renouncing poetry.

I think of the form of the exchange between Jim and me as an exaggerated farce.  At its core is a real argument, a debate that we really had and that continued throughout our real-life fact-checking process.  But at some point during that process we also decided to do a book about the process, at which point we revisited the basic scaffolding of our discussions and turned the volume up on how we discussed these issues.  Why did we do this?  Because as fascinating as Jim and I are, we are also pretty mild-mannered guys, and we knew that most readers would probably not be fascinated by two dudes having a sober discussion about the very nerdy issue of veracity in nonfiction.  Even though I occasionally would sling some heartache Jim’s way during the fact-checking process, I was never as assholey as the writer’s persona is in the book.  But it’s that writer’s snarkiness—and the fact-checker’s eventual willingness to bite back—that makes the book kind of funny, I think.  So we were trying to find a way to make a serious but rather dry issue (veracity) feel relevant and entertaining (dick jokes).

Mercury is a book, a book composed of five books. I labored over its structure like an animal. I must have made thirty drafts. There is a metabook over the book, which is the book made of its images. The book is backwards, standing on its baby’s head. There are lots of books in there. Discreet entities that eventually coalesce could be the case, yeah. The structure is the most important thing about the book. The structure is its justice. I want it almost to feel like water tinged with – faint hint of something – I want it to be readable like that, so easy that you just drink the water, this “tortured water” as Thomas Vaughan rather allegorically describes the substance of mercury, and find it has just enough particularity to relieve you of yourself, and just enough transparency to pass yourself through it, and just enough shine to sting you with yourself, bring you into a heightened state of consciousness.

David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 today. With that in mind, below is a fascinating letter he wrote at 33 years of age, to Don DeLillo — an award-winning author and playwright for whom Wallace held a great deal of respect. With Infinite Jest written and soon to be published (to huge acclaim), Wallace was faced with a problem: although the quality of his writing was improving, he was having less fun in the process.

Lists are created, and have been for many centuries, for all manner of reasons. It's my aim to feature some of the most notable examples right here.

Walt Whitman, ultimately revered as “America’s Bard,” began his career as an obscure newspaperman. In 1855, seeking to expand his audience, he mailed his self-published collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who replied with a laudatory note. Emerson was dismayed to discover that Whitman went on to publish the note in several newspapers, as well as having it printed up in a new edition of Leaves of Grass. But Emerson’s tribute notwithstanding, the book was met with widespread indifference.

When I’m working, I’m not aware of any literary influence; I mean, I’m sure it’s there, but it’s not conscious. I get an idea and I sit down and write, and I never think about anyone else. There are a few sort of mantras I keep in mind, and those tend to keep me focused. But they’re not other books, mostly they’re sentences, and some of them are kind of weird.

About two months ago, The Millions joined the Tumblr community. So far, the going has been great. The platform is perfectly suited for dynamic storytelling, and as a direct result, it is home to some of the friendliest book lovers around. However, the site’s SEO (or lack thereof) is regrettably unkind to Tumblr outsiders, and this leads to two things. On the one hand, the insularity stokes the kind of kinship that makes its community so tightknit. On the other, the lack of easy searching reduces each blog’s chance of attracting new (or outside) viewers. I’d like to change that. By creating this list of my favorite “literary Tumblrs,” I hope to turn you on to some of the sites that make The Millions’ dashboard that much brighter.

With writing, i don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. i don’t see that as playing a role. it’s just appearing in public.

Established in 1998, GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (formerly known as Menendez Publishing) and founded by Didi Menendez publishes poetry books and the literary journals OCHO, MiPOesias Magazine, plus Poets and Artists, which also features visual works by contemporary artists. Poems that have first appeared in OCHO and MiPOesias have been included in the anthologies of the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Menendez is also the creator of miPOradio, (“where poetry tunes in”).

Consider the singing of suspended telephone lines or the vibration of a car antenna at certain mid-gruesome speeds. (A similar aeolian phenomenon is “flutter,” caused by vortices on the leeward side of the wire, distinguished from “gallop” by its high-frequency, low-amplitude motion.) To do so would be synonymous with considering the Kármán vortex street: a term in fluid dynamics for a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of a fluid’s flow over bluff bodies.

Most art and literature I care about arises from an impulse to do something impossible -- whether the medium is language or paint or Vaseline -- and then the question is how will the artwork fail in a way that nevertheless enables a glimmer of what escapes it.

I'm sitting with Chang in his bathroom. Chang is in the bathtub washing himself. He is scrubbing like he is trying to remove his skin.

It takes either a tremendous amount of courage or a certain kind of privilege for somebody to say, “I can be an artist.” It didn’t occur to me that I could be a writer. I can remember reading Vonnegut’s books and, my freshman year, the teacher reading us Catcher in the Rye. He was this hammy guy; it was amazing. But I didn’t make the connection that you could try to do something like that, that there are people who decide that they get to write novels or stories.

SUICIDE by EDOUARD LEVE
The only proper “novel” to make this list is hardly a novel at all. A decidedly non-fantastique faux-memoir in the second person, the intertextual play of Leve the artist/author with the protagonist of the book itself creates a zone of affect that the words in the book, the text itself, fills perfectly. I’ve also talked about this book before, but hardly has another book haunted me in the way this one has, a decidedly straight-forward complexity, a fictionalized reality used to approach reality as fiction.

Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶?, June 15, 1763 - November 19, 1827),[1] was a Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest of the Jōdo Shinshū sect known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa (一茶?), a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea[2] (lit. "one [cup of] tea"). He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson and Shiki - 'the Great Four, Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki'.[3]

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music "changed their life," especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

“The city burning,” Joan Didion once wrote, “is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself.”

Sometimes when you think you love something what you really love is not the thing itself but just some small and inessential part of it: you think you love banana splits but really you just love the maraschino cherry on top and you think you love autumn but really you just love getting a Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks and you think you love Shrek but really you just love that montage near the end after Shrek and Fiona have their falling out when he’s sitting in his swamp all alone and she’s getting ready for her wedding and Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” is playing in the background, and you think you’re in love with him but really you’re just in love with the smile that pops onto his face when he spots you in the Think Coffee near Washington Square Park...

So why the 21 year absence, G.? Perhaps you visited but did not note, like we do when visiting home and not contacting any of our old acquaintances because sometimes we don't want to deal with that old self again?

This is a collection of books I often recommend, books I’ve come back to again and again, books that should be given a chance if you haven’t yet had the occasion to pick them up. I always push The Known World on people, for instance, because I think it’s the best novel of the past 20 years, and is probably under-read given how good it is. A couple of the titles here are recent books I’ve enjoyed and happened to think of when I was assembling the list. These are books I can guarantee will deliver the goods. So much so that though I can’t personally refund your money if you don’t like one of these, I know the Strand will gladly do so. In fact, they’ll probably throw in some free stuff on top of the refund — some really great free stuff. Probably as much as you can carry. Thank you, Strand!”

Armed with a letter of recommendation from Norman Mailer, a cash-strapped Frostburg State dropout arrived in New York in 1972, hoping to join the gloriously sooty ranks of The Village Voice. Four decades on, in an excerpt from his new memoir, he recalls the beckoning paradise of a city going to hell.

Jeffrey Eugenides insists his new novel is not a roman à clef. But it might have been: The writers of his generation had youths tangled enough for ten novels.

“His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.”

When the work is going well, it can reach a level of spontaneity and unpredictability that is exhilarating — but it doesn't make the writer (not this writer anyway) pound the tabletop. It's an interior sense of satisfaction that's often so fleeting it can't be relived (or even remembered) when the writer revisits the page in a more critical mood the next day or six months later.

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”

If you are young and you should write asking to see me and learn how to be a somber literary man writing pieces upon the state of emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime — if you should be so young and fatuous as to do this, I would not do so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed. And if you were dying of starvation outside my window, I would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.

Most things good for writing are bad for life. “May your life be not very good material” is a blessing I offer students and small babies.

I woke up. I wanted to write a piece called “Death of the Model.” I wanted to talk about “the demented power of the lights,” how literature is evil, the end of my “career,” the end of the artists editions, my conceptual death, my simulation of life, my meltdown in print and on tape, my public facade, my disappearance from Los Angeles, my disappearance from the Atlanta scene, my disappearance from New York in the holiday of 2009. My resolution to “end this shit” in 2010. To kill off the poems. To seek an unmediated communion with my audience.

It is by now a cliché to classify a writer as unclassifiable, but 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellow Peter Cole is importantly difficult to place. I think he’s an American poet, but I’m not entirely sure; since 1980, he has lived primarily in Jerusalem. I consider him an experimental writer, but his work is as formally indebted to medieval Hebrew poets as it is to postwar American poetries. He is a Jewish poet, certainly, but above all in his ceaseless questioning of what such a phrase might mean: “Israel is he, or she, who wrestles / with God—call him what you will / not some goon (with a rabbi and a gun) / in a pre-fab home on a biblical hill.” The sheer scale of his accomplishment as a translator makes him an outlier: he’s translated widely from modern Hebrew and Arabic, and in The Dream of the Poem, an anthology of Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain between the years 950 and 1492, he brings the verse of five centuries into English with deep scholarship and the lightest touch. And his own poetry is perhaps most remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off—the affective range is wide and the forms restless. From his home on the seam between East and West Jerusalem, Peter fielded questions about translation and his new book of poems, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled.