perfect endings (i)

 

One of the faces I love most in the world.
Martin Donovan when he was young.
Why are the faces we love also the ones that haunt us? There is memory of rain, particular rain, past-eleven in the morning rain, in all the faces I love. Being able to remember the exact light, the exact feel of the fake-marble cheap table under my hand. The cheap coffee. The exact light. Rain smells of the pavement it falls on. It's grey.
The needless tragic ending of Amateur. Which is not to say it's not a perfect ending. It's perfect because it didn't have to be tragic. The randomness of its tragic outcome is what makes it perfect. What makes it tragic. It's not the blood, it's not the death. It's the fact that there could have been not-death, not-blood.

I don't know if I can really help you through your uncertainties.

As far as missing out on life because of devoting your time to writing, I don't think you need to worry about that: life will happen to you no matter what you do. There will be joys and celebrations. There will be nights crossing bridges you don't know the name of when some unspeakable beauty envelopes you.

Dean Young.

the breaks between research are for sleeping, not reading

browsing through the latest issue of Action Yes.

in awe of the two wonderful poems by Amy Catanzano.

currently obssessed by the expression, "My lines keep falling through the false floor."

small-sized bites of ant food.

1) There's an excerpt of Sasha Fletcher's When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill The Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs In The Clouds at Lamination Colony. The except is full of new & surprising words that you'll want to eat up. You can order the novel(la) from ML here. Wish I could order it now (but I'm afraid all my internet ordering funds were caught up in ordering ML's First Year Anthology). In any case buy it cause Fletcher writes pretty pretty things such as this little thing here.

2) Speaking of ML Press (& how it basically dominates my life in alarming ways), Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart is ready to go will soon ship. I was thinking how nice it would be if it were the first book I read in 2010...

3) Everything is Fine is a novel by Socrates Adams-Florou. Check the extract and cover and stuff.

4) I Hate Blake Butler Cause He Makes Me Feel Like An Ignorant Poser When He Talks About 25 Important Books Of The 2000s (Of Which I Have Only Read 2) could be an awesome title for a song, yeah. It's also very, very true.

5) Mmmm, you know, when I was little I used to had this irrational hatred of number 5. I don't know when that stopped. Maybe in college. I would like to know why it happened, though. The circumstances that conspired so that I'd stop hating 5.

it's God you were looking for.

Things that are brilliant this week:

- Early Sunday Morning re-watch of Bresson's Lancelot Du Lac. I only meant to watch a scene but it's so mesmerizing that I ended up going along for the whole ride once more.

- Louis Ferdinand Celine:

Long live Peter the Great! Long life to Louis XIV! Up with Fouquet! Genghis Khan, ten thousand years! Up with Bonnot-and all his gang! And anybody else for that matter! But weep ye no tears for Landru! Because every bourgeois has got some Landru in him. It's sad, isn't it? And there's nothing to be done about it either! The revolution of '93, in my opinion, was the work of the lackies! Lackies who took everything word for word, lackies who vociferated, lackies of the pen, who, one fine night, took over the castle, all of them crazed by jealousy, raving, riddled by envy, they pillage, slaughter, and then settled in to count up the sugar, the sheets, the cutlery... they inventory everything... they were never able to stop. The guillotine was an accounting office... on they go counting up the sugar lumps till they die... mesmerized by the lumps! You wouldn't even have to hunt them down to kill them-you'll always find them in the same place-down there in the kitchen, counting. They're still there. What can they lose by it! You can't take this pack of windy, intellectual, impressionist, confusionist, leftist, unreconstructed, conservative hair-splitting arguers-all of them up to the gills in ulterior motives-seriously! One look is enough. They'll go where you tell them to go. After the smell of lucre! Onto the soap-box!

- John Hopkins at the ICA, "Insides". Sometimes I wish I could write like music, liquid and lost.

- Gigantic Magazine is out and I've finally caught up. Loving the design so much. I also love this little piece of art intensely.

- Dogzplot call for submissions for their next issue is on the theme of MAGIC. For some reason it made me think of Jonathan Safran Foer's short story for A Convergence of Birds and how I read it as a re-telling of Death in Venice but I never really knew what it was about. Maybe I should write something about magic.

- This poem by Evie Shockley at the Winter Issue of Le Petite Zine.

- Any poem by Bernadette Mayer.

- J.A. Tyler's review of Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas:

Scorch Atlas is a world of mold, a world of festering wounds, a world of hurt. Scorch Atlas is a carefully and meticulously distraught world of language, a trembled and shaken line of thought, a vibrant dead trance of phrasing, the measure of words put together all and in the right ways.

why we love fyodor

"Loose women would gather in the house right in front of his wife, and orgies took place."
The Brothers Karamazov.

Apart from being a kickass writer in the truest sense of the word "kickass" reading Dostoevsky is always an exercise on regaining the pure, unadulterated joy of late-teenage reading. It brings me back to the time I first started reading Borges, Cortazar, Faulkner. Because, and this is something I don't hear people say nearly enough, reading Dostoevsky is a lot of fun. The kind of books you lose hours of sleep upon, reading into 3 or 4 in the morning for the sheer pleasure of the story, the language, the pathetic and unforgettable characters, the dry sense of humour, the humanity. 2007 saw me falling in love with Crime and Punishment. Last year I read The Idiot voraciously and loved every page of it. I decided to tackle elusive Karamazov (I remember trying to read it when I was 14 in an atrocious Spanish translation, I gave up after 100 pages or so). Sleepless nights to come.

Other cool things read this week:
- Andrew Borgstrom's "Stories with teeth in them" at Lamination Colony. Clever with great turns of phrase.
- JA Tyler interviewing Sean Lovelace for the new Chapbook Review.
- Jimmy Chen's "Check, please?" which I have no idea why I hadn't read before. Sometimes it's hard to be up to day with favourite authors. Also, May was a difficult month.
- Page 94 of Le Clezio's The Book of Flights, specially "let me see the reverse, the interior, life's red hollow, the fissure..."
- Bookslut's interview with Brandon Scott Gorell. I find it hard to talk about poetry, not because I don't read a lot, quite the contrary. What I mean to say, Scott Gorell is amazing.
- George Saunders' "Sea Oak" at the Barcelona Review. For some reason the line "It's Father Brian with a box of doughnuts." has stuck in my head.
- Adam Thirlwell's Miss Herbet, which I've been reading on and off in the uncomfortable couches of Foyles South Bank.
- Senses of Cinema's article on the Straubs & Cézanne. Quite rad. I've only started getting into Straub's and Huillet's work seriously this past summer, it's heavy stuff, even for us former film students but it's completely gorgeous and essential art. It makes me excited about cinema again. Also, glad to be reading Senses of Cinema once more. I had lost track.

Also, Blake Butler got a deal with Harper Perennial. That's really great news. I can think of few authors that feel more exciting than Butler nowadays and it's great to see cool people doing well.

Also, ML Press is going to publish an anthology with all their chapbooks. I am so tempted to pre-order like right this very instant. So many amazing stuff in there; Brandi Wells and Jac Jemc and Brian Evenson and Peter Markus and Johannes Goransson and Eugene Lim and... Well, you get the picture. I wish I wasn't broke (and/or saving for a trip to New York next spring). Maybe even so I will give into the temptation. It's damn cheap, too, if you ask me.

Question: Could buying another edition of Chris Killen's "The Bird Room" just because it has a different cover be considered a waste of money? If the answer is yes, I don't want to know. After all, I own 6 different edition of "Lolita", thank you very much.

youtube alerts sometimes conspire against you

Chris Killen reads from "Paul Simon Gives Chevy Chase The Finger" at Rough Trade East.

I spent most of my weekends at Rough Trade East and yet I was not here. I did not know Chris Killen was going to be there. I have missed my chance to stalk him.

You still can submit something to the Guardian Short Story competition. I am going to. It's a story about nazis and Sotheby's auctions.

I went to a classical music thing about Robert Burns today. It was in a very small church in the City. All the musicians were irreverently young and odd-looking. It felt like I was witnessing some sort of Nodame Cantabile cosplay.

How would I ever become a serious literaty author if I keep referring to Haydn in terms of japanese manga for girls? Maybe then I do not want to become a serious author. Does Ian McEwan casually quote Hana Yori Dango at parties? I wouldn't want to be Ian McEwan in any case.

The BBC documentary about Rufus Wainwright was rad.

on the shelves (or not): Loops #1

The first issue of Loops magazine is out. It includes new fiction by Chris Killen, whom, after reading The Bird Room, has become my latest literary crush. His story is titled "Paul Simon Gives Chevy Chase The Finger". Here's a bit from an extract in their website:

Paul Simon picks up a controller and presses a button, and the Yo La Tengo best-of CD Prisoners of Love starts playing throughout the house. Paul Simon sits on the salmon-coloured leather chair and listens to Yo La Tengo and closes his eyes as his cornflakes become soggy. Paul Simon wishes he could somehow saw himself free from the rest of his life, and go into a flotation tank and just listen to Yo La Tengo forever. He would eat using a tube and soup, maybe.

My current broke-ness* prevents me from picking up a copy right now. So my game plan these days is reading the whole issue standing up at HMV. This has started (yesterday, HMV at Covent Garden). You can also find Richard Milward's "Drugby Union" in it. Richard Milward is too young to have published two books and though I enjoyed Apples a lot I think I hate Richard Milward for being too damn young. Or maybe I just hate myself for not having two books published and poor Richard Milward has done nothing to deserve my hatred. Also, I must remember I liked people from Middlesborough because Mendieta played there for about five years.

If you can buy Loops #1, do so. It's edited by Domino Records and they produce Eugene McGuinness so even if record companies are always evil at least Domino's evilness has brought Eugene McGuinness to the world. Eugene is a force of Good. In any case, the magazine is fun to read.

* my current pathetic monies situation will become worse if I get selected to do this course. I would use that year to write a novel about britpop called "Song nº2" possibly. Or chick lit fiction. Or my planned series of YA novels about steampunk and Jack the Ripper and aliens in Victorian sewers and alchemists and Fredrich Engels. One of those three. Or not.

in defence of the mediocre (that's me)

you know, i get why contest have entry fees but on the other hand, I just spent 7 quid entering the Bridgeport Prize and it kinda hurts. (and with a story that, in its first incarnation, was already been rejected by Ambit Magazine so I don't know why I bother - but I am secretly gleeful that at least I know one of my heroes Ali Smith will be reading the entries, so there's that).

And then there's the Manchester Fiction prize, which I really want to enter but oh well IT'S 15 BLOODY POUNDS. surely, the prize is £10,000 but most of us won't win that so. Getting shortlisted for that would be the coolest ever, wouldn't be? I mean, it would give me a proper excuse to finally visit Manchester, land of Thomas De Quincey, Jeanette Winterson, the Hacienda, Life on Mars and the 1999 football team of everybody's dreams.

In short: I want to enter literary contests but have no money. Entry fees are unfair (for me right now, I'm sure if you give me five minutes I'll come up with a good defence of contest entry fees but right now I'm hungry and can only afford Dae Ramen noodles as dinner).

I also had an excerpt of my novel, The Cardiff Affair, rejected by Dogzplot. And it's only Monday. Let's see if I can get to my birthday with at least five rejections this week.

It's really hot in London today and I don't feel like buying groceries. I stay in my room and go through the "very awesome writing" folder in my bookmarks and I wish, more than anything for a moment, that I was as talented as Matthew Kirkpatrick.

on rejection

There's this wonderful thing Jac Jemc does in her journal: she posts about every rejection he gets about any of her poems or stories. It is intensely healing to read about those things. Writers sometimes feel very alone about this sort of thing, we often think we are the only writers in the universe to ever get rejected. I enjoy other people's misery stories as much as I enjoy their triumph stories. Both are inspirational in their own way.

I had a job interview today.

I really wanted that job. It's a job at the theatre. And- Oh boy, I was going to say "theatre is my thing" but it's more really a matter of theatre being the thing that I want to be my thing.

Well, needless to say -if you take a hint from the title of this entry- I did quite badly in the interview. I did horridly. Comically so. I should make a short film about the kind of incompetence I displayed today.

What is more, this week I got a neat letter from Ambit saying they weren't interested in my story. Thank you but no, thank you.

Writers are a funny lot. On one hand we tend to be quite ego-bound, quite tough in our arrogance to believe that we have something to add to the history of literature (that we have something to say and all those trite lines, etc). On the other hand the level and frequency of our exposure to REJECTION is amazing. There must be something masochistic about us. Even then most detached author has to admit that something quite secret and private goes into writing and piece and then to send it out in the world and have someone you've never met say "bleh, I don't like it" (& send you a letter about how they don't like it), wow, it's really a grim prospect. Why do we keep doing this?

So I got rejected by Ambit. And I obviously didn't win the Mslexia short story contest with my Shakesperean tale. Or the Bristol Prize. And I'm obviously not going to win the ABCtales contest with my shitty, juvenile story. And the Bush won't produce my plays. So yeah, rejection is in the air this summer.

Sometimes I worry I am not edgy enough. I look at the writers I admire, the writers getting published frequently are either on the side of weird, dark, or extremely experimental. I think I stick too closely to traditional forms (I'd like to blow them from the inside, like Sarah Kane blew half of Blasted). I wish I were weirder, darker or more experimental.

I also wish I was Samuel Beckett.

Actually I mainly wish I was Sam Beckett.

So today's theme is rejection. It always hurts, even (specially?) when we say it doesn't. I felt monumentally shitty after doing so bad in the job interview. And as I often do when I feel less than brilliant I walked into a bookstore. Surround myself with books, that soothes the pain somehow. That sounds really esoteric and wanky. Sounding like a pretentious 14-year-old was my main trouble in the interview. I have to look into it. Anyway-

This afternoon I sat down at Foyles and I picked up a copy of Chris Killen's "The Bird Room". I never put it back. I took it home.

it's a good idea if you click "masthead" there's a picture of a boat. at sea.

I wish I could describe how this short story by Kevin Wilson makes me feel. I want to plagarize it or retell it or turn into a movie or paint a watercolour out of it or sleep with it and wake up in the morning with it. It made me create a new folder in My Favourites called "awesome short stories" except that I misspelled "stories" as "soties" and I am to lazy to change it so now it's "awesome short soties" whatever that means. There's only five stories in that folder until now. There are very few soties out there that can make me feel as failed and revolutionary as Kevin Wilson's.

Big Fat Failure days are pretty standard these days, I go to bed at dawn and sleep late and mainly write crap at night, or watch shitty CAM versions of new movies or read e-lit zines and feel bad and pretentious. Mainly I update Tumblr with pictures of Dirk Bogarde.

This post by Shane Jones is very wise. It makes me feel bad because I haven't bought "Light Boxes" (also makes me feel bad because I like the German NT). I don't know Shane Jones but his writing feels new and somehow like we need one of those out there, if you know what I mean. I really want to read "Light Boxes". I really want to not be without money.

I wish I was less addicted to online lit mags.

I wish one of them would publish me.

I wish I wasn't so scared to send stuff to the ones I really like.

I wish I hadn't bought Cathy Yardley's "How To Write Chick Lit" because I don't plan on ever writing chick lit so it was quite a ridiculous impulse buy and all of its pages make me feel bad about myself and the world.

of the day. story. stories. stores.

jeff wall.

4.
The man is trapped inside her pillowcase. He thought he could escape, but then she put the pillow sham on and he couldn’t find a way out. After a bit, the pillow sham made him feel more comfortable, like she was the kind of girl that would piss with the bathroom door open and drink beers with him on Sunday.

Fifteen unrelated stories titled "The Man Inside Her Pillowcase" by Brandi Wells. Keyhole Magazine.

read. evacuate. sleep (not)

f.goya

Think how words become benign in languages you don’t know; compare it to the satisfaction of a twist ending; remember smashing your forearm against the doorknob accidentally and admiring the deep shades of the bruise.

THE TACKINESS OF SOULS by jac jemc.