Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Willow Springs

Issue 65 of Willow Springs features poetry and prose by Matt Bell, Diana Joseph, Laura Kasischke, David Wojahn, Gary Copeland Lilley, and Robert Wrigley, among others. A conversation with Charles Baxter ranges from plotting the points between Barthelme, postmodernism, and Kafka to exploring the theory-death of the avant-garde. Fady Joudah takes a stance against the term “political poetry” and discusses fidelity in translation.

The deadline for the Willow Springs Fiction Prize is March 1, 2010. One story per entry. All entrants receive a one-year subscription. Full submission details are on the website. Send a $15 entry fee with your hard copy entry to:
Willow Springs Fiction Prize
Willow Springs
501 N Riverpoint Blvd, Ste 425
Spokane, WA 99202

Bark is a new blog written by current and former editors of Willow Springs. Visit Bark to read, view, comment, and engage other writers and readers: thebarking.com

Beginning February 1, Willow Springs will accept poetry submissions online. Check the submissions page for details.
As of April 1, 2010, we will no longer accept hard copy (mailed) submissions in prose. Prose submissions must be made through the online submission manager. This affects fiction and nonfiction only; we will continue to accept poetry both online and through the mail.

The Willow Springs Fiction Prize will continue to be hard copy only.

Willow Springs
501 N Riverpoint Blvd Ste 425
Spokane, WA 99202

http://willowsprings.ewu.edu/

Gulf Coast

No postage? No paper? No problem.

We spent our holidays putting the finishing touches on our new online submissions manager to save you some paper and postage. It’s simple to make an account, upload, withdraw, and keep track of your submitted work. Don’t forget that Gulf Coast now accepts unsolicited reviews and interviews in addition to fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and lyric essays. So send us your stuff! Online submissions are our preferred method of submission, though we will continue to accept postal submissions through the end of our reading period this year.

$3,750 IN PRIZES FOR FICTION, POETRY, & NONFICTION

We’re currently accepting entries for the 2010 Gulf Coast Prizes: $1,000 each (plus publication) for an essay, poem, and short story. And for the first time this year, one honorable mention in each genre will receive $250. Just for entering, you’ll get a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast, and all entries will be considered for publication, regardless of whether they win. You can now submit to our contests online, or by post. View our contest guidelines and send us your work! The 2010 Poetry Prize will be judged by Mark Doty, and the Creative Nonfiction/Lyric Essay Prize will be judged by Eula Biss.

If submitting online, be sure to select one of the genres labeled “CONTEST” when uploading your work, otherwise we’ll regard it as a regular submission. And remember, you do not need a PayPal account to enter online; you can use your credit or debit card. If there’s any issue with your payment, we’ll contact you.

So Subscribe, Submit, and Enter to Win! It’s all online.

Best of luck with your reading and writing in 2010! We look forward to considering your work.

Sincerely, The Gulf Coast staff

Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts
Department of English
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-3013

http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/

The author of more than 90 books — most of them written on a typewriter — Westlake wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West — in part because people didn’t believe he could write so much, so fast.

His first novel, “The Mercenaries,” was published by Random House in 1960. His early works dealt with organized crime as seen from within. Critics said his early work showed a rigor and objectivity worthy of Dashiell Hammett.

Westlake quickly established himself as a master of what Boucher called “sustained narrative and observation within the framework of a self-consistent world, alien to law and convention.” – ^{^}

I’m sorry to see such a prodigious and playful talent go. Although he wrote entertainment, there was more truth in it than so many of the “literary” and “realistic” negative but uplifting neurosis festivals that people call books at this point.

My favorite is still Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, the story of a practical joker who must find an excuse to stay in jail — so he can pursue his new life of crime, and avoid a worse fate for others.

[P]eople haven’t been taking the prize as seriously anymore. By selecting exotic token choices and veteran compromise candidates, all the selection committee has succeeded in doing is to put literature editors under a lot of pressure to find anyone who knows of or can even remember the winner after the judgments have been announced in Sweden. – Uncle Sam Has Bigger Problems, Spiegel, October 2, 2008

While this article is ostensibly about the politics of American authors winning the Nobel prize, it comes from a European paper, and this paper may be less willing to look at how authors worldwide seem to have much less to say of import.

I wonder why.

Literary periodicals ought to be the dam against the ever-rising flood of bad and unprofitable books produced by the unprincipled scribbling of our age. With the incorruptibility, judiciousness and severity of their judgments, they should scourge without mercy all patchwork put together by incompetents, all the page-filling through which empty heads seek to fill their empty pockets, which is to say nine-tenths of all books, and thus work against triviality and imposture as their duty dictates; instead of which, they promote these things: and their abject tolerance allies itself with author and publisher to rob the public of its time and its money. Their writers are as a rule professors or literati who, because of low salaries of poor payment, write from need of money: so, since they all have a common aim, their interests are in common, they keep together, mutually sustain one another and speak in favor of one another: this is the origin of all the laudatory reviews of bad books which constitute the content of literary periodicals. Their motto ought to be: Live and let live! – Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

I was sorry to hear of the recent suicide of David Foster Wallace, a talented novelist who battled depression for most of his life. He reminds me of others who have passed on in similar ways: polymaths, very much invested in being aware of their worlds, very much in love with life, highly intelligent and sensitive people.

Having lost several friends this way, I would like to say that I think the solutions offered to us by the philosophers and spiritual leaders of our time are not addressing our problems. Intelligent people who love life kill themselves generally because they see no point in going on because they feel the outside world is doomed, and it feeds their inner depression, which quite frankly we all have somewhere.

I think we should pay more attention to these suicides. The best artists do not design their lives as art works, but these lives and deaths are nonetheless instructive. David Foster Wallace showed a great commitment to life, to giving a darn about how things turned out, and toward a respect and reverence for life itself. If he turned away at the last minute, we should get some answers and not nebulously blame “depression” and change the channel.

He walked into a crowded exam room and opened fire before shooting himself in the head. He was taken to hospital with series (sic) head wounds and died later.

Kauhajoki mayor Antti Rantakokko confirmed that nine people were killed.

The rampage came almost a year after another gunman killed eight people and himself at a school in southern Finland, an attack that triggered a fierce debate about gun laws in the Nordic nation with deep-rooted traditions of hunting in the sub-Arctic wilderness. – Police questioned student day before massacre, The Independent, September 23, 2008

Why does this keep happening? I think literature itself can give us some answers:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. (William Wordsworth, 1807)

Imagination has taken a distant second place to what we can “prove,” with financial charts and out-of-context scientific studies. We treat life itself as a product. (Literature in turn has sadly followed this pattern as well with the rise of “literary realism” and “workshop writing,” but that’s another story.)

We should pay more attention to the works like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which hopes to show us through similar ideas in unrelated disciplines that there is an order to our universe and a way of living that complements it. I hope he rests in peace and we can remember him for what he gave to literature.

A long time ago, I wrote a story called Glitter Gold about those who huff paint and what it does to them. In it, one detail was that gold paint gets paint huffers the most intoxicated. Ever since then, reality has been imitating fiction:

According to a Bellaire Police Department report, Tribett’s pupils were constricted and he replied slowly to their questions. Oh, and “officers observed the paint on face and hands,” as can be seen in the below mug shot. ^{^}

One point of the story was that humans had to make life hopeless for paint huffing to seem attractive (as is the case with many intoxicants). You don’t need an escape valve until you so screw up the situation that people are desperate for escape. They don’t even want to enjoy life — they just want to check out.

In surveying the park, the officer noticed a man sitting in a lawn chair outside of a residence. He asked if the man had been huffing paint and the man said no.

However, when the officer approached and shined his flashlight toward the man, he noticed what appeared to be “fresh, gold-colored paint clinging to his nose and cheeks.” The officer also noticed paint in the man’s facial hair. ^{^}

One disturbing aspect of checking out is that once you’ve been out, you don’t want to be back in. Literally, you’ve seen a world where you don’t care about a damn thing except your bag full of paint. Why would you go back, to mortality, wars, corruption, pollution, Schadenfreude and bad TV? Inhale. Check out. Repeat.

In June 2006, Wheeling police said they found Tribett on 16th and Main Streets intoxicated and covered in paint. He was charged with public intoxication.

A week prior to that arrest, police found Tribett huffing paint under the Interstate 470 bridge. Police said when they found him, Tribett looked right at them but continued huffing. ^{^}

As much as the story shows its age, or rather my lack of experience at the time in getting said what I needed to say, its premise still rings true. People lock themselves into mazes of “can’ts” and the messy control issues of others, and finally, it all culminates in either total checkout or a conflagration.

McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups, under the heading “We Are All Critics Now”. He argues that the demise of critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but conservatism and repetition. “The death of the critic” leads not to the sometimes vaunted “empowerment” of the reader, but to “a dearth of choice”. It is hardly a surprise to find him taking issue with John Carey’s anti-elitist What Good Are the Arts? (2005), with its argument that one person’s aesthetic judgement cannot be better or worse than another’s, making taste an entirely individual matter. McDonald proposes that cultural value judgements, while not objective, are shared, communal, consensual and therefore open to agreement as well as dispute. But the critics who could help us to reach shared evaluations have opted out. The distance between Ivory Tower and Grub Street has never been greater. While other academic disciplines have seen the rise of the professional popularizer of art, music and film, literary expertise has sealed itself off in the academy. McDonald believes that the main reason for the gulf between academic and non-academic criticism is “the turn from evaluative and aesthetic concerns in the university humanities’ departments”. He does not bemoan the influence of the Richard and Judy Book Club or the internet; he blames his fellow academics. ^{^}

As literature and journalism get obsessed with competing with Peoplemedia, which is the word I’m going to use for user-generated content (UGC) in the sense of Wikipedia and IMDB, they have tried too hard to be everybody’s friend and inoffensive to everyone, and the result is books that are like weak tea. You can see right through them, there’s a hint of taste, and you’re v. v. glad when the cup is over.

The greatest secret of humanity is that, just like in grade school, what most of the people around you are saying is unadulterated horsepoppy. They just don’t the answers to the questions they pretend to answer. No one means badly in telling a rumor, or in passing on an urban legend, but urban legends and rumors are just as much B.S. as what these same people tell you about science, politics, and art.

Now that we’ve opened up the floodgates, too much of this B.S. has come into literature, and as a result, most authors are afraid to take a stand for risk of not competing. It’s good to see the tide turn.

Early drafts of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl, from the Roald Dahl museum in Birminghamshire, England.

I think it’s good we take a good long hard look at what we’re calling literature these days and if it enhances our lives less than quality ice cream, chuck it out the window and start over. No one has the time for hollow lit, whether they know it or not.

	submitted	published
water	19.9%	24.8%
death	14.1%	15.2%
blood	11.7%	13.8%
stone	11.1%	16.0%
bone	9.1%	7.8%
poetry	7.6%	10.3%
heart	7.5%	6.7%
fish	7.0%	5.3%
birth	5.5%	7.4%
darkness	3.9%	17.0%
rust	3.3%	2.5%
cat	2.3%	2.8%

^{^}

The poor editors at the Virginia Quarterly Review just went through their poetry submissions and found that cliche trumps a lack thereof as far as getting published goes. While I think it’s vain to be totally afraid of cliche, generally its presence means a regurgitation of tired topics that no one really wants to read. As one commenter said:

The only difference
between poetry
and that which is not
poetry
is how you use
the return key.

Which may explain why it is a
dead
art form,
Practiced by many
but read by none. ^{^}

On the nose!

Apparently Tom Wolfe is returning to literature after disappointing sales but rave reviews for Charlotte Simmons, a book I personally enjoyed because the heroine is so admirable and brave it makes you want to cheer her on from your seat. He’s now tackling an issue most of us in the wealthy nations find squeamish: while we are debating whether or not our policies and institutions are moral enough, the rest of the world has cast morality aside for tribal allegiances.

So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies and unite us. “La Raza!” as the Puerto Ricans cry out. “The race!” cries the whole world. The Muslims? Their jihad? Their Islam? All that is nothing but a screen, a cover story. What they are, is … Arabs! Forget the rest of it! Arabs! — once the rulers of all Asia and half of Europe! Once the world’s reigning intelligentsia- — and now left behind in the dust of modern history! Back to blood, muhajeen! They, like all people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds — Back to blood!” All people, everywhere, you have no choice but — Back to blood!^{^}

I’m not sure what I think of it yet. I like everything I’ve read from Wolfe so far, in content at least, and ignoring his often atrocious bombastic style. I never feel like he takes a point of view, as much as observes in advance, using his knowledge of sociology and the rigid link between self-identity and moral relationship to society at large. In his realism he may be closer to the future than the past of literature.

What’s more interesting to me is that his ideas here resemble the predictions of one of the greats of political science. While I find much of his work also provocative and alarming, he’s also the most cogent predictor of how the world will react during the next decade. This thinker is Samuel Huntington, who in his latest opus, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, predicts a similar outcome to the one Wolfe decides above, except Huntington has more vectors of tribal identity to discuss.

Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together. Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs and the fault lines between civilizations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics.
During the Cold War a country could be nonaligned, as many were, or it could, as some did, change its alignment from one side to another. The leaders of a country could make these choices in terms of their perceptions of their security interests, their calculations of the balance of power, and their ideological preferences. In the new world, however, cultural identity is the central factor shaping a country’s associations and antagonisms. While a country could avoid Cold War alignment. it cannot lack an identity. The question, “Which side are you on?” has been replaced by the much more fundamental one, “Who are you?” Every state has to have an answer. That answer, its cultural identity, defines the state’s place in world politics, its friends, and its enemies. ^{^}

Wolfe has delighted in exploring taboo topics in the past, most of his intent seeming to be to pierce our “fiction absolute” of living in the best way possible than really taking us into a partisan view of the situation. As with his other books, this new one will involve a careful study of class, gender, ethnic and religious tensions in America and how they create an otherworldly environment that destabilizes us. That Tom Wolfe — he’s half Noam Chomsky and half H.L. Mencken.