After a hiatus of a few years, the intellectually-engaging, always interesting, often confrontational and downright maverick literary/cultural magazine The Baffler has returned!

I just picked up my copy at the bookstore where I work. Most bookstores with a decent magazine rack should carry at least a couple copies. At least the ones in San Francisco do. But even then it can be hard to find. …more

“It is the official art of authoritarian governments, aimed at extending state control through propaganda. Totalitarian kitsch exists to glorify the state, foster a personality cult surrounding the dictator and celebrate ceaseless and irrevocable social and economic progress through images of churning factories and happy, exultant workers.”

I have long pondered the boundless evil of all things kitsch but now thanks to this article (via Bookforum) I have new reasons to fear it.

“How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call ‘unpleasantness’ is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience?

Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.”

At The Millions author Peter Straub makes a strong case for taking horror as seriously as anything else.

Just when I thought I was unique, just as I’ve been spending the last six-odd months editing a short story about the misadventures of retail workers during a city-wide blackout (Santa Cruz, circa 2002) I read today that actually everyone has a blackout story.

(And no, not that kind of blackout.)

Since everyone has a blackout story (read: electrical power failure) of some variety, what intriguing conclusions can be drawn? …more

“New online lockboxes allow you to specify beforehand who’ll get your passwords, which private Flickr photos should be purged, and what final status should be posted at Facebook, but these services are no substitute for a will. And writers and other artists should be especially careful about relying on them.”

Maud Newton ponders the potentially troublesome issue of digital remains, especially for writers.

I’ve been regularly attending events and film screenings at Artists’ Television Access on Valencia Street in San Francisco for almost a year now.

I’ve gone as both volunteer and audience member, in the company of wily friends or in my own, often more obtuse company. …more

Poetry doesn’t seem to sell, although there are  hundreds upon hundreds of poets creating it. I would venture to guess that there are at least twice as many poetry contests out there than fiction contests. Everywhere I turn I see the smiling, slightly abashed face of a poet.

Why do you write poetry? I ask them. Because, they say, it helps me talk about the abyss. And when I talk about it, I don’t have to think about it as often.  That sounds advantageous for both reader and writer, I tell them.

So why do books of poetry never sell at my bookstore?

Whenever somebody buys a book of poetry at my store I feel I have to congratulate him or her and then we start talking. A lot of the time, I discover, the book of poetry which the person has purchased is or will become a remedy, an analgesic, a salve, a poultice, a bandage, a funerary stone, or a hopefully uplifting gift to somebody who is suffering or bereaved.

Fiction isn’t necessarily as compelling an antidote as poetry. I think my speculation that fiction sells more than poetry might have something to do with suffering and loss. The fact that people don’t want to explore their own frailties and potential infirmities and foreseeable despair. In fiction there tends to be characters who can live out all the suffering for you.  They are not you, at least not thoroughly.

But poetry has that strange way of reflecting every sad inch of you.

Yet if we consider poetry as less a morbid exploration of these bleak realities and more of a redemptive confrontation with them, then poetry will start selling like The Power Of Now or The Secret.  Poems, instead of all those smug, unrealistic books on self-deification, will be the signposts directing us down navigable routes through thickets of pain and wastelands of loss.

I was inspired to share these unrehearsed thoughts after I read a couple recent articles about the nature of poetry and grief.

At Harriet The Blog, Sina Queyras has an amazing piece on grief and poetry, full of gems like this:

“That’s what I’m after. A mournful song, yes, but I want an elegy that is sculpture, I want it big and abstract, or like a dance piece, silent and explosive, or I want it to descend on me like waves, or be built of straw with outlook points like peaks of meringue; I want to evoke the beloved in some surprising way, having become light, or spun of contrails. I want to sculpt a poem for this brother, the second I have lost, the second brother.

The second article, however, is only available in the print edition of the most recent Poets And Writers: The Art Of Reading John Donne: The Sick Genius Of Remorse by William Giraldi. Giraldi talks about the crushing despair that beset him after his father’s untimely death and how he rediscovered the poetry of John Donne as a way to blaze his way out of the darkness. Donne, of course is responsible for such lines as “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. . ” It’s an extremely moving article and can convince you that delving deep into any poet can unearth treasures of perseverance and terrible beauty.

I think, whether the genre is fiction or poetry  or lyric essay, that the undefinable yet unmistakable trace of the poetic grants us that hard-earned dignity to be mere mortals struggling in a broken world. I think that’s what Donne was saying and Shakespeare and Sappho too.

The poetic can show us unflinchingly what’s already ruined and what will be burned at some later date but the fact that we can talk about it at all, that we can wrestle down words to express the inexpressible is liberating and humanizing.

(Recently, I burst out crying while (finally) reading  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which to me is one long poem about salvaging light from the most unimaginable darkness. I think everyone needs to read that book. It’s a necessary remedy.)

As a bookseller I need to make it my job to convince others of the healing quality of the poetic. And then soon Charles Simic and Anne Sexton will be flying off the shelves.

“But even before the official pub date, The Coming Insurrection benefited from an ‘endorsement’ from Glenn Beck. As part of a seven-minute rant on Fox News in July, he said, ‘I am not calling for a ban on this book. It’s important that you read this book.’

“Since then, each time Beck has talked about the book, sales have spiked, according to MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner. It’s latest jump came after Beck devoted an entire segment to The Coming Insurrection, which he called ‘quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.’”

Thanks to Bookninja, I was delighted to learn that Glenn Beck is inadvertently helping a recent book of anarchist polemic, The Coming Insurrection, published by the respectable leftist house Semiotext(e) vault up the bestseller list.

“What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. . .

“More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.”

At the New York Review Book Blog, Tim Parks makes the case that the globalization of literature has dulled writer’s senses of local color and nuance.

Parks further makes the claim that writers seeking global readership are all beholden to the same bland, politically-correct politics, as well as the same globally-recognized “literary” flourishes:

“If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as ‘literary’ and ‘imaginative,’ analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those ‘working for world peace.’”

“Whimsical, highly aestheticized, conspicuously casual, reverent of childhood and its signifiers, bound by the dialectic of irony and sincerity, the style of McSweeney’s has become the style of post-post-Modernism.

“It is No One Belongs Here More Than You and Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, yes, but also American Apparel and Avenue Q, the films of Michel Gondry and the career of Michael Cera. It is vast swaths of Echo Park and the Bay Area and Brooklyn.”

At The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg ponders Dave Egger’s culture-defining projects and why he would make a great, if unorthodox editor of The Paris Review.

“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no coincidence that so much slapstick involves cars: in Bergson’s terms, automobiles are automatically funny).”

At 3 a.m. magazine, a wonderfully varied and provocative essay on the works of Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.

…more

“San Francisco’s Marcus Books has long been a gathering place for African-American authors such as Maya Angelou. But last year, manager Blanche Richardson faced the realization that the 50-year-old bookstore might have to close, the victim of a mix of demographics and economics.

“To even have to contemplate closing this place, with all of its history, is painful to think about,” she says.”

Via Bookninja, an article about the exodus of African-Americans from San Francisco.

“What the profiles fail to reveal is that the literary apprenticeship is a lengthy one for the majority, that getting published at all is difficult, and to get paid enough to not do anything else but write is virtually a dream.

The supposed average money earned by a novelist is $10,000, but if that novel takes two years to write, then cut that in half, $5,000. As one online article trenchantly stated: ‘Most novelists and story writers would make more money if they worked full-time at McDonald’s.’”

At The Millions, The Writer Career Arc or Why We Love the Susan Boyle Story.

But I have to say if I worked full-time at McDonald’s I’d be dead by now, and by my own hand.

“To sit down to read a novel is a mere fraction of the commitment required to write one, but in both cases the commitment must be made, and it needs to be driven by something very deep: What is essential about this story?

Why does it need to be told, other than to begin the career of a new writer? 

Lesson: To be sure, there are no new stories or new truths, but if we are going to revisit certain ones time and time again, it seems absolutely necessary – at least to this writer and reader – that it’s a story that needs to see the light of day, a story without which we’d be somehow poorer.”

Elegant Variation presents us with a very helpful, if occasionally frustrating summary of mistakes that debut novels make. …more

“Edmund Wilson encouraged his second wife Mary McCarthy’s first forays into fiction by shutting her in a room for three hours and asking her to write a story.

Author Shirley Jackson’s husband Stanley Hyman, a literary critic and writer for The New Yorker, devised strict writing schedules for her. And with the money from Jackson’s royalty checks, he purchased a dishwasher to make more time for her writing.”

At The Millions, a provocative essay on the joys and difficulties of balancing relationships and writing.

“But the idea that genre is a tool, not a prophecy goes beyond combating genre snobbery, I think — it’s actually helpful for writers to think about when crafting their next novel.

Just because there’s this marvelous tool for helping readers to understand your story, doesn’t mean your story has to be crafted around the tool.”

At io9, they’re talking about the advantages of using genre as a tool, especially in regards to sci-fi. …more

“For me, if there’s a piece of writing that I care about, I want to have the physical object,” says Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space. “There’s a permanence to it, a different kind of permanence than if you find it on a website. You’re bringing together these different voices and pieces, and the way those pieces interact between those two covers is essential.”

Jacket Copy today ponders the future of printed literary journals.

“M.M.: What do you wish to do before dying?

R.B.: Nothing special. Well, clearly I’d prefer not to die. But sooner or later the distinguished lady arrives. The problem is that sometimes she’s neither a lady nor very distinguished, but, as Nicanor Parra says in a poem, she’s a hot wench who will make your teeth chatter no matter how fancy you think you are.”

I had totally forgotten about Bolaño’s last interview, which the NY Times Paper Cuts has just now made me remember.

…more

I just learned from Jacket Copy that “Menifee school district in Riverside County has removed the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from all school shelves after a parent complained about a student running across “oral sex” in its pages.”

It’s thanks to dirty dictionaries like that one that I decided to become a writer.

…more

“Rousseau once said, if I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority?

No, majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is a very flawed notion of what democracy is.

Democracy has to take into account several things—proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. And also has to take into account that majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. So yes, people have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.”

The AK Press Blog has an insightful interview with Howard Zinn, who died yesterday, about his anarchist beliefs and how they might be put into action in today’s political climate.

“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.”

Jacket Copy last week pondered the unfortunate tendency towards suicide, especially among poets, and why you are not allowed to kill yourself anymore.

If you have any  doubts about the power of the novel, or its lasting cultural significance, or its transcendent ability to deepen and enrich our chaotic earthly experiences, look no further than this impassioned conversation at The Believer between two of our most exciting novelists, Colum McCann and Alexander Hemon.

Alexander Hemon: “I want a book to contain a world—indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise. Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write. Danilo Kiš said that he started writing only after he overcame his disgust with literature. . .”

“And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts.”

Rebecca Solnit blogs at Guernica about the media stigmatization of looting in the Haiti earthquake and elsewhere. Her conclusions, as you can imagine, are refreshingly unconventional and subversive:

“After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.”

“The first time I read A Sport and a Pastime, just two years ago, I knew I’d experienced something unusual, alive, difficult in its directness; not something to look upon “fondly,” but a story that, like all great art, connected me more deeply and truthfully to my whole human self – sans irony or “cool.”

[...]

The nakedness of these characters is soul-deep, and the novel demands no less of its reader; the “new narcissism,” per Roiphe –“boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of ‘I was warm and wanted her to be warm,’ or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world” – won’t do here.”

At The Millions Sonya Chung joins in the collective response to Katie Roiphe by singling out a wonderful writer that Roiphe had neglected to mention: James Salter and especially his novel, A Sport and a Pastime.

“When you’re not religious, sacredness means something that fills you with awe.

The creation of something awe-striking requires a pure offering, an opening up to the universe. It’s not always an act of risk, that could land you “in the clink” or with a broken body or with your blood trickling out onto the sidewalk, but it’s always an act of uncertainty, of changing molecules into something that wasn’t there before.

I think it might be brave.”

-Elizabeth Bachner at Bookslut

There is a refreshing sense of unbridled enthusiasm, non-ironic celebratoriness and the glee of a passionate polymath in almost all of Elizabeth Bachner’s essays but this one I find particularly wonderful.

“My grief has been all the usual and varied colours of sadness and madness. It has been searing, voluptuous, numbing.

I foresaw that it would be — I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not foresee that, this time, for much of the time that I was most antic and most lost, most peculiarly undone, I would have taken from me (I would, I suppose, take away from myself) that which had always been of such solace to me.

Quite simply, I could not read.”

At ReadySteadyBook, founding editor Mark Thwaite shares today his experience with grief and how, in the process of grieving he discovered Hamlet.

In times of grief, what do we do if can’t do what we have always done? …more

I don’t know about you but this is the year I finish that @#$#@%!  novel.

I got two hundred pages of rough stuff. Real rough stuff.

The first novel. The one I’m allowed to be cavalier about, right?

The one people will say, provided it ever gets published: oh that was just his first novel. That’s why it was so childish and so preoccupied with sex and werewolves and time travel.

(But wait: we like those things!) …more

“I’d been thinking about writing a book on genocide for some time, but the project really kicked off about a year-and-a-half ago, around the time my wife told me she was pregnant with our second child.

Naturally, I thought about the Holocaust. It wasn’t a morbid thought, or at least it didn’t seem so to me.

The thought was this: “At least our first son will have someone to go to the concentration camps with.”

At Tablet, Shalom Auslander, discusses his latest project: a self-described “comic novel about genocide.” (!)

He will be making a case for himself through ongoing installments at Tablet. Installments that will certainly be as provocative and unsettling and perhaps even hilarious as the very project he intends to complete.

“The Notebook is the collected entries from 87-year-old Saramago’s blog, O Caderno de Saramago. The book, ‘which has already appeared in Portuguese and Spanish, lashes out against George W. Bush, Tony Blair, the Pope, Israel and Wall Street,’ according to the Independent, in its report on the book’s Italian publisher dropping it for criticizing Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi.”

Saramago’s blog, in book form, is just one of the many things we have to look forward to in 2010.

Thanks to The Millions for scouting out these likely treasures.

With so many shopping days left until whenever, there is no end to the amount of printed matter out there that is riveting, ravishing and ultimately rewarding.

The book blogs are overwhelming to someone like me who wants to read everything. I’ll try to control myself as we venture through them.

At The Book Bench, the unique rewards of editing David Foster Wallace.

Jason Sanford poses questions as to the efficacy of science fiction in helping us confront our imminent cataclysms. (Via: Ecstatic Days.)

And because I can’t stop linking to Jeff VanDerMeer’s Ecstatic Days, here’s an interesting discussion about the connection between art and social justice.

At The Millions, the joys of writing in trains.

Does self-publishing work? That has been a hot item of dispute at 3:AM magazine. Here’s a counter-argument.

Jacket Copy analyzes our decade of bad reading.