Further Updates + Elsewheres

Just for the record: CBooks has (geographically) moved this past year, in fact just this past month, hence the paucity and quiet. Things'll be coming back sortly, be appraised. Of course, the speed with which this place gets back to more regular posting depends a bit on where else time's being drawn with other work, of which there's been a bit lately. Meaning:

Still going strong at the Kenyon Review, with posts here and here (both basically reviews, with digressions).

I reviewed Paul Maliszewski's fantastic Prayer and Parable for the Mpls Star Trubine; I've been waiting for this book since 2003, and was thrilled to finally get the whole thing, and the review for the Strib's short because they've got word-counts to consider and everything, but, really, you should be reading this book pronto.

(Maliszewski's one of those 'experimental' writers whose work's fundamentally driven by non-character engines—the scenario, the world of the story, dictates the eventual shape of the story as much as anything else. In this he's lots like Helen DeWitt, whose Lightning Rods is coming this October and is fantastic. I'd be curious who else writes like this, this almost Borgesian way, in which schema/systems are as critical for book movement and heft as anything else [Barthelme, obviously, too][Danielewski's great in HoL, and, sure, his other stuff's systems-based, but don't pretend it's good writing—he's gone so far that the system/rules now dictate everything; reading him feels like listening to someone sing individual notes with perfect clarity for exactly 1 minute at a time and expecting thunderous applause for technical mastery].)

For what it's worth: Blake Butler's done some amazing stuff recently at HTMLGiant, not least putting up his submission list from 2006-2008. I'm personally interested in such a thing because 1) I like Blake and his work and 2) it was through a submission that I met the man. I have nothing exciting or sexy to say about what he posted, but when it went up I felt like it was just so fucking yes I didn't know where to begin. Maybe this: Blake's one of the younger writers it seems like lots of folks talk about, at least right at present this year, and I happen to mostly loathe some of the other younger writers getting press lately, and Blake's response to people giving him attention seems one of the most generous and good things he could possibly do: he showed the work involved, what things too, the costs. Way too many younger writers are convinced that there's some magic involved in securing an agent and a pub deal and etc., and I'm sure there are folks who've had different experiences, but shit is it a good public service of Blake to put up exactly how many submissions it took him—in just a two year period—to get to where he's now got. If more writers owned up to this I think we could demystify the shit out of the whole snarky business (and I'll note that this post is ironic in the extreme given Blake's earlier piece: one'd think that writers should be those least inclined to flex any jealousy muscles, given that we all know the fucking insane amounts of work that go into getting things out and published. I'll also submit that the line "Poets are the most jealous type of artist" might be the single fucking stupidest sentence I've read in a year, if not more).