Clifford Garstang's Blog, page 101
June 18, 2012
New Website
This post is a little circular because I’m announcing the arrival of my new website and integrated blog, but since you’re seeing the post, you’re already seeing the new site!
But I invite you to explore, not only the blog (all the old Perpetual Folly posts have migrated), but also the rest of the site–links, descriptions of my books, my events page, etc. And while you’re here, please sign up for my mailing list so I can send you notices of the events I’ll be doing this fall in support of the new book, What the Zhang Boys Know.
June 16, 2012
Happy Bloomsday!
It’s June 16, Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. I’ve read the book before, but this year, beginning today, I’ve undertaken with a group of friends on BookBalloon, to read it again. The discussion starts today. You should join us.
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. . . .”
June 13, 2012
Buy a book on June 14!
Buy this book! No, seriously. Go to my Amazon.com page and buy this book on June 14. Or you could visit the publisher’s website and buy the book there: Press 53.
Or, if you already have my book (thank you!) and you think it’s too early to start your Christmas shopping (really?), you could purchase one of the other fine books published by Press 53. It’s an impressive and growing list.
Here’s the thing. Books purchased directly from Press 53 between Memorial Day and Flag Day (tomorrow, June 14) will support the publisher’s Books for Soldiers campaign. For ever book Press 53 sells, they’ll send one book to an active duty service member. But if you’d rather buy through Amazon.com, the publisher will also send one book to a service member for every ten books they sell on Amazon.
Summer is almost here. You need to stock up on your books for summer reading!
June 11, 2012
The New Yorker: “Monstro” by Junot Diaz
June 4 & 11, 2012: “Monstro” by Junot Díaz
Quite a story. The voice seems typical for Díaz—sort of a post-apocalyptic Yunior. But in this story, Yunior, a student at Brown, heads down to the D.R. for the summer while his mother is getting treatment there for some illness that would be too expensive in the U.S. While he’s there, he amuses himself by hanging out with Alex, a rich friend from Brown.
But the story is retrospective, and so we know from the beginning that something terrible has happened and that the narrator has survived. The story unfolds: an infection has appeared among Haitians. It’s horrible and it gets worse. Victims (for some reason spelled “victims”) are isolated into camps, and anyone who is taken from the camps is drawn back. And then the infected people go on a rampage, killing everyone in their path. (This is already looking like a Zombie Apocalypse, but the word “zombie” isn’t used.) Meanwhile, the narrator is hot for Mysty, a friend of Alex’s, a girl beyond his reach. Alex wants to go take pictures of whatever it is that’s happening. The narrator and Mysty tell him he’s nuts. But then, the U.S. government reacts in a big way, with consequences that extend beyond Haiti . . .
Maybe this is just a science fiction story, or maybe Díaz is saying something about the United States. In the story, the infection is mostly ignored until it’s too late. And then the action that’s taken is military, and may have created more problems than it solved. Not exactly a difficult conclusion to reach.
June 10, 2012
Events!
With my new book scheduled for release on September 1, I’m beginning to schedule events. Lots of events. Teaching, reading, speaking, whatever.
Check out my events schedule to see where I am and where I’m going to be. If you’d like to invite me to appear at an event (festival, conference, class, library, club, whatever), I hope you’ll let me know. I’d love to do it if I can.
The New Yorker: “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan
June 4 & 11, 2012: “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan, plus Part One.
I found this unreadable on my first, lazy effort. I don’t like the form—fiction in tweets?—and so I was highly resistant. But then I listened to the podcast conversation between Deborah Treisman and Jennifer Egan (which includes shorter conversations with Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, and Junot Díaz), and decided to give it another try. You can find the podcast here.
The first thing that’s interesting is that the main character is LuLu, drawn from Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and the story is set in the 2030s. And the “tweets” are really the character’s recorded thoughts as she carries out her spy mission. Egan says she isn’t a tweeter, and that’s evident from this piece. The story is tweetable—segmented into short bits, something that’s been done—but isn’t made up of credible tweets. The bits are, however, legitimate “lessons learned,” which, Egan tells us in the podcast, was the working title of the story.
The story, part of which is available for free, concerns a woman who has been implanted with chips and communication devices (Really? These aren’t detectable?). As an unpaid “citizen agent” she infiltrates a terror cell by being a “beauty” for one of the “violent, ruthless” men. Her instructions include how to dress: “Gold spike-heeled sandals may compromise your ability to run or jump, but they look good on tanned feet.” Still, the woman is part of something called “the new heroism” in which “the goal is to throw off generations of self-involvement . . . to dig beneath your shiny persona.” And that, it seems to me, is what the story is really about—discovering what lies below the surface.
But other than that, it’s mostly just a suspense story set in the future: what is LuLu going to discover? How will she escape?
So, in the end, the story that I at first found unreadable I now think of as a pleasant diversion. I still don’t like the form, though. (Note, however, that it’s largely in second person and, it seems to me, this is a case where second person makes sense as the thoughts really are separated from the physical person.)
June 8, 2012
Fall for the Book, September 26-30
I am very pleased that I’ll be participating in this year’s Fall for the Book Festival in Northern Virginia. Besides me, there are some terrific writers you’ll want to hear, including Michael Chabon, Karen Russell, Alice Walker, and many others.
The schedule for the festival hasn’t been posted yet, but I’ll pass that along when I hear.
June 7, 2012
Gathering of Writers, August 18, 2012
The Gathering of Writers, hosted by Press 53 and Prime Number Magazine, is a full-day workshop for fiction and nonfiction writers on August 18, 2012 at the Community Arts Café in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Similar to Press 53′s annual Gathering of Poets, which takes place each spring, the Gathering of Writers features gives participants the opportunity to work with four different workshop teachers throughout the day. I’m delighted to be part of the faculty for the program, along with John McNally, Valerie Nieman, Tracy Crow, Susan Woodring, and Kim Wright. If you are in the Winston-Salem area, or can come for the day, please join us! (Participation is limited to the first 53 registrants.)
And there’s more! The night before the Gathering, Press 53 is hosting a FREE event at the Community Arts Café to celebrate the release of my new book, What the Zhang Boys Know, which you can read more about here.
Look at me, I’m a poet.
I’m a fiction writer. But I do like to read poetry and from time to time I also write poetry. I almost NEVER submit my poetry for publication however, because . . . because I don’t know why. I guess because I haven’t studied poetry formally and feel like an impostor.
But recently I did submit a poem, and the good folks at Used Furniture Review accepted it for publication. So here it is: I Said I Was Not Interested. Leave a comment on the magazine’s site if you like the poem.
Why is there no Prosist Laureate?
The Library of Congress has announced that the new Poet Laureate of the United States is Natasha Trethewey. Read more about the appointment .
I think that’s awesome. I like her work very much and people who know her say she’s a terrific individual. It’s great to have a younger PL for a change (no offense to her immediate predecessors), and nice to have a woman and an African American — who happens to be a wonderful poet. So, kudos to the LoC for this choice.
But why don’t we have a Prosist Laureate along with our Poet Laureate. We all know that literacy needs all the help it can get. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a writer designated by the LoC to promote fiction? Who should it be? Bearing in mind that the Prosist Laureate wouldn’t necessarily be America’s greatest living writer, but someone who would make a great representative of the literary arts, tell me who think we should name to this important position.
