Lauren Eggert-Crowe interviewed me for The Rumpus about my ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. You can read it here.
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, by James Lasdun
In 2003, English writer James Lasdun taught a fiction workshop at a college in New York City. The star of the workshop was a woman in her 30s he calls “Nasreen”, who was working on a novel based on her family’s experiences in pre-revolutionary Iran. “There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers, and they aren’t hard to spot,” Lasdun writes in the early pages of his memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. “It was evident to me, after a few paragraphs, that Nasreen was one of them. Her language was clear and vigorous with a distinct fiery expressiveness in the more dramatic passages that made it a positive pleasure to read.”
The Soft Bulletins: The Rise of the Whispering YouTube Video
We open with a close-up of a young woman’s face, shot from below. She gazes downward into the camera, her light brown hair hanging so low as to almost touch the lens. Her eyes are wide with what seems a kind of maternal solicitousness. When she speaks, she does so very quietly and softly, with a mild European accent that is difficult to place. “Hey, sweetie,” she says. “Do you feel a little bit better?” She touches the lens—the viewer’s face, your face—with a gentle finger. “Yeah, you’re having a fever, hun. I just have a little bit of a wet towel. I’ll just put it on your cheeks a little bit, and your forehead, okay? Yeah? OK, sweetie?” She turns away from you for a moment, and when she turns back, she has a blue facecloth in her hand; with this she sets about gently dabbing and wiping your poor, fevered little brow. It is no fun being sick, she tells you. But she wants you to know that you, her sweetheart, are going to be okay. For a further 13 minutes or so, these moistly whispered reassurances continue, until finally the screen goes black, and the whispering fades to silence.
Review: How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields
When you read David Shields, the first thing you learn is that he takes literature very seriously. The second thing you learn is how seriously he takes his taking seriously of literature. There’s a striking moment in the closing pages of his new book, “How Literature Saved My Life,” when he tells us that he is interested only in literature that obliterates the boundary between life and art. “Acutely aware of our mortal condition,” he writes, “I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it).” If there were such a thing as a quintessentially Shieldsian pronouncement, this may be it, with its odd tonal mixture of the bombastic and the beseeching. Shields wants you to know that he is a writer for whom neither life nor art is a matter to be taken lightly.
Missing Out, by Adam Phillips
My wife, who is pregnant with our first child, had her three-month sonogram in early September. Right after the scan was finished, I had to run out of the hospital and down the street to where we’d parked our car about an hour and a quarter earlier. We’d only had enough loose change to pay for an hour’s parking, and we were in increasing danger of getting clamped. I sat in the car and waited while she signed some forms at the reception, and as the rain spilled relentlessly down on the windshield, I took my phone out of my pocket and looked at the photograph I had taken of the sonogram image just a few minutes before. It struck me as a strange and uniquely contemporary experience, to be looking at an image on a screen that depicted another image on another screen that represented my first glimpse of my first child; it was somehow, paradoxically, all the more touching for this sense of an alienating technological double remove.
Was Amanda McKittrick Ros the Worst Novelist in History?
An extract at Slate from my ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
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Who was the worst novelist in history? A definitive answer is probably impossible, given that total artistic failure traditionally results in total obscurity. But it would be foolish to even consider the question without taking into account a very notable exception to that rule—a schoolmistress from Northern Ireland whose novels were so uniquely and thrillingly terrible that, in the early years of the last century, she became an ironic cause célèbre among the cultural luminaries of her time. Her story gives us some perspective on what we tend to think of as a uniquely contemporary phenomenon: the ironic appreciation of bad art—of monkey-faced frescos and multichapter R&B melodramas. This terrible novelist was a sort of early avatar of the spirit of the Epic Fail.
Both Flesh and Not, by David Foster Wallace
There’s an aspect of the David Foster Wallace nonfiction reading experience that hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been much remarked upon. To read his essays, reviews and articles is (for me at least) to feel a kind of retrospective anxiety on behalf of the unknown editors who commissioned them in the first place. For instance, one of the pieces collected in Both Flesh and Not, the new assortment of Wallace’s nonfiction, is a review of a special issue of a journal dedicated to the form of the prose poem. Early in the piece, which originally appeared in the literary periodical Rain Taxi, Wallace makes a point of explaining the unorthodox way in which it’s written (essentially, it takes the form of an exhaustive itemised list of aspects of the text): “The words preceding each item’s colon technically constitute neither subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognised grammatical unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against RT‘s rigid 1,000-word limit.”
