Phoebe & Etc.

I got my contributor copies of the new issue of PHOEBE in the mail yesterday. The issue looks beautiful. I really like it. The front and back cover art is nice. I've read a bunch of the work so far and it is very well put together. It seems to form a continuum. My story is the last one in the issue and seems to be perfectly bookended by Zachary Schomburg's opening. Ryan Call and company did an excellent job putting this together. There is also work by Aaron Burch, K. Silem Mohammad, Kim Chinquee, Erin Gay, Heather Green, Karen Rigby, Anne Boyer, Brandon Lewis and lots of others.

My story is the longest I've ever published. It is called SEABED. It is in my collection SCORCH ATLAS. Here is the first graf:

Gilbert had a head the size of several persons' heads—a vast seething bulb with rotten hair that shined under certain light. Several summers back he'd driven to a bigger city where smarter men removed a hunk of him due to the wide black cyst that'd laid claim to his brain flesh. They'd said it was on account of the wires that hung over his parents' house. Little Phillip hadn't been so fortunate. The crap ate through the kid's whole head. Radiation. Scrambled cells. One had to be mindful of these things. Now, though, with the woman gone and the baby dead, Gilbert didn't give much of a damn. He kept on living in that house where guilt breathed in the walls. He lugged the kid's last Christmas tricycle everywhere, the handlebars screeching from side to side with rust on account of how Gilbert even brought it in the shower.

To read the rest, please buy the issue. It's only $6.

To receive this publication, I winkum blubvad steerzum cubba ling fwahblip eich non slem, et veer vod auslit peerpeep nigh-jum tiki soldinaffutz.

Also: there was a new story by BEN MARCUS in the latest issue of Harper's. I wanted to read it but I didn't have $7 on me when I saw it. I read a bit of it standing in the store but I was in a hurry. It seemed very different from his other stuff. Much more linear and standard-seeming. It was kind of a detective story. Weird.

Also: the next issue of Harper's has a DAVID FOSTER WALLACE story, which is supposedly also very different than his other stuff. I have to find that damn thing.

Also: Is anyone going to AWP? I know it's sold out but you can volunteer on their website to work 4 hours and they get you in for free. I am trying to arrange it so I can go. I had a lot of fun last year but that was easier since it was in my backyard.

More Ben Marcus

Began rereading 'Notable American Women' today. I do remember that the opening letter from Ben's father is a bit slowgoing as an opening, but still made me laugh and/or amused and/or provoked.

Here is a quote I like from that section (pg 15), which is pretty definitive of the language used here (one of the main reasons I admire the book):

"A father is pleased anytime a son can regulate his busily superficial mind for the time required to command a book's worth of language to the page. Such a feat is particularly notable, given the aforementioned mental challenges of the son, when it can barely be expected that the son remember to bring potatoes to the underground area where his father waits to be fed. When his only task is to bring a potato to his goddamned father, or to let new air into his father's area, where the old air has already been used, because there is a living man down here!, or to to walk his father up above when his father has gone months, motherfucker, without seeing a house, a stick, a bird, a window, a road, the key objects of our time, when his father has no new air to clean his eyes and rid his skin of the language fluid poured in by the man with the tube, who speaks his Sentences of Menace, trying to burst the father's body with words. Let a man wash himself, and stride in the open air, for fuck's sake! Given his systematic incompetence and neglect of the one person he was born to live, how can a single word from Ben Marcus's rotten, filthy heart be trusted?"

Strange, yes, and non-narrative, but I think the passage is funny and works well, particularly leading into the surrealist text that follows.

While searching earlier today I found an interesting list of writing prompts Marcus used with his students while teaching at Brown. read here. some of them are clearly generative of Notable American Women itself, particularly #5: Design a religion. This could include a theory of creation (How did we get here? How did something come from nothing?), a system of rules and punishments, moral do’s and don’ts, clothing, architecture, prayers, etc.. You could instead write a story in which the characters practice a new religion — it does not have to be the subject of the story, but it can be used to generate interesting behaviors and ideas in your work. If you think of religion as a successful fiction — a set of provocative ideas that have satisfied the hardest questions of a group of people — you might better determine how to make a religion that might come close to satisfying you. When we consider the fiction writer as someone who provides necessary myths to the culture, we see that devising a religion might very well be an appropriate task.

I don't much like writing to prompts myself, but they can be useful for thinking sometimes, and interesting at least to apply to Marcus's thought process in his own work.

ben marcus?

i wonder what happened to ben marcus. his book NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN is one of the greatest things i've read as far as experimental narrative goes. more people should read that book. it came out in 2002. the only other thing i've seen from mr. marcus since then was the anthology of american writing he edited and his essay on experimental fiction as a response to jonathan franzen, which was really well written and interesting. i hope he is working on some ridiculous new book that will arrive soon and help me read more.



here is a quote i like from NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN:
'If all the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell other words correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherent arrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn't upset people, it means this book is legally another book.'

also here's a link to an interview ben marcus did with brian evenson that i find really very good: marcus interviews evenson.

i just finished rereading Steve Erickson's RUBICON BEACH and then i read Roy Kesey's ALL OVER which had some incredible stuff in it. now i am going to reread Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN. i think i am going to spend the rest of the year rereading stuff i already know i really like. there are so many books i call favorites that i haven't read in so long it is like i didn't read them. i have a terrible retention rate. there are people i've met 15-20 times and hung out with for hours and still can't remember their first name.

i am also going to reread Nicholson Baker's THE FERMATA, which if you haven't read it, is 320 pages about a man who learns to pause time and then goes around doing perverted shit to women while they are frozen. he does it really well.

i want to get a job teaching a writing class somewhere. or start an online writing school. as dumb as that might seem. someone help me.