Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Best Nonfiction:
Townie – Andre Dubus III, Bossypants – Tina Fey, Granta 116: Ten Years Later – Granta, Ed. John Freeman, Swerve – Stephen Greenblatt, The Heart and the Fist – Eric Greitens, Arguably – Christopher Hitchens, In the Garden of Beasts – Erik Larson, Sex on the Moon – Ben Mezrich, The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson

Best Fiction:
Ready Player One – Ernest Cline, The Sisters Brothers – Patrick DeWitt, The Language of Flowers – Vanessa Diffenbaugh, West of Here – Jonathan Evison, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead – Sara Gran, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day – Ben Loory, The Tiger's Wife – Tea Obreht, The Tragedy of Arthur – Arthur Phillips, The Fates Will Find Their Way – Hannah Pittard, We the Animals – Justin Torres

Best Young Readers:
The Chronicles of Harris Burdick – Chris Van Allsburg, A Monster Calls – Patrick Ness(inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd), OK for Now – Gary D. Schmidt, Wonderstruck – Brian Selznick, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs

Best Business Interest:
Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain – Ryan Blair with Don Yaeger, Money and Power – William D. Cohan, Tell to Win – Peter Guber, Boomerang – Michael Lewis, The Quest – Daniel Yergin

Hudson Booksellers' 2011 Book of the Year:

West of Here by Jonathan Evison



Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/27/4011...

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/27/4011...

Outskirts
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly


Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch.
It's a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city.
Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap,
but the clocks are against it.
Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues.
Auto-body shops occupy old barns.
Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.
And these sites keep on getting bigger
like the land bought with Judas' silver: "a potter's field for
burying strangers."

After a Death
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly


Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Cohen's lyrics are superior to Dylan's? you think so?

I just saw on a PW tweet that the gamblers are now leaning towards a little known poet from Minnesota named Robert Zimmerman - never heard of him

Adonis is the favorite amongst the gambling literati - this has got to be his year!

"To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem’s perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.

If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.

A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great. As you proceed through the poetry in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate poems in this matter grows, so will, so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry"

Issue 33 Deception Spring 2009
The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley
Christine Wertheim


­­“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem…?”


“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can 
explain all the poems that ever were invented—and 
a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.”
­—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass


In 1945, John Ashbery discovered ­th­e work of an obscure Au­stralian poet named Ern Malley. “I liked the poems very much,” Ashbery recalls. “They reminded me a little of my own early tortured experiments in surrealism, but they wer­e much better.”1 Later, in 1961, he included two of Malley’s poems, “Boult to Marina” and “Sybilline,” in an issue of Locus Solus edited with Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler. Though neither Koch nor Ashbery believed Malley had any influence on his own work, both thought of him as a “secret, exotic, precious, outlandish figure” whom they would teach in their poetry classes at Columbia and Brooklyn College, introducing his work to the next generation of American writers, and, through them, back to their Australian peers John Forbes and John Tranter.2­­­­



Like Baudelaire, who imported Poe into France and returned him to America as a symboliste, Ashbery and Koch brought Malley to the US and returned him to Australia as a shining example of a new postwar avant-gardism that reveled in pastiche, ironic quotation, an­d love for the feel of a Bad Poem.3 By this circuitous means, a man on the margins of culture at the time of his death in 1943 was finally acclaimed in his own land in 1991 when Tranter included his entire oeuvre in a Penguin anthology of Australian poetry.4­

But who exactly was Ern Malley, and why had it taken this detour through American letters to send his star streaking through the great blue vault of the Ozzie cultural sky?


In his authoritative book The Ern Malley Affair, Michael Heyward outlines the main events of the poet’s tragic life. Ernest Lalor Malley was born in England in 1918. In 1920, after his father died of war-related injuries, the Malleys emigrated to Sydney, Australia. When their mother died in 1933, the fifteen-year-old Ern was left alone with his sister Ethel. After high school, he worked for a while as a car mechanic, then drifted to Melbourne, where he sold insurance and lived alone in a rented room. At the beginning of 1943, struck with Graves’ disease, he abruptly returned to Sydney, where, despite Ethel’s care, he died on 23 July at the age of twenty-five, leaving nothing behind but a sheaf of handwritten poems and a postcard with a curious inscription. Ethel, not being of a literary bent herself, but loving her brother, bound up the sheaf and sent it to the editor of a literary magazine, Angry Penguins, published from Adelaide. Max Harris, the Penguins editor, recognized at once the genius that was Ern and decided not merely to publish the poems but to devote an entire section of the Autumn 1944 issue to them, complete with a full color image by the great Australian painter Sidney Nolan 
illustrating lines from Malley’s “Petit Testament”:

I said to my love (who is living)

Dear we shall never be that verb

Perched on the sole Arabian Tree


“No young Australian poet had ever had a more auspicious launch for his work,” says Robert Hughes in his afterward to The Ern Malley Affair. “His early death, clearly, was a tragedy. But then it became apparent that, behind this tragedy, a comedy lurked. Ern Malley was not dead, for he had never lived. He and his entire oeuvre had been made up, in the course of a single afternoon in a military barracks in Melbourne, by two young poets, Corporal Harold Stewart and Lieutenant James McAuley.”5 In other words, Ern Malley was a hoax.


http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues...

easy prey it seems, to take one at his most sincere, even or especially when he is least likely to be pursuing sincerity, and yet the desire is still to splay him like a foggy london night upon an examiner's table - etherized or not - I am never sure if the prose I peruse/pursue is the height of purple or plangent until someother body makes so bold as to make pronouncement on the qualities thereof - overbold? overstated? doesnt mr HI-Man!/dont you imagine Mr Capote may have been having a larf at Mr Joyce's expense?

nothing so badly misses its mark as a missed point or the joke that floats off meandering in the air over one's own head

how about they get lazy?

I've got Zazen and Sisters Bros on the list already I'll check out the others - sayles is a good call too

so no one else has read anything published this year that they'd consider for such a list?

Just between us that title (as well as another obvious choice) has been nominated (and both titles have fans on the voting committee so Im keeping my fingers crossed)

and Im with you - it's a hardship when there are so many great things that I havent read published before this year

Something Happened is better - Good as Gold also maybe

(ps before someone asks the obvious (it being only July) question, we get ARCs that's how)

the company I work for publishes a best books of the year list every year during the holidays and we have already begun to generate a list of titles. I thought it might be cool to see what you lot might add to such a list. So what books published this year would you recommend for a best books of the year list?

the album Toys in the Attic and the novelization of the classic schlock Jaws wannabe movie Orca starring Richard Harris - cant say why, cant say its a good thing. I was 12 but even today, if I hear Uncle Salty, I still think about that vengeful pissed off whale doing damage right and left

I second Deadwood, Dexter is almost always on the beam(and the Sisters Brothers was quite good too btw)

Also I dont see Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times which I very much liked

heard a little NPR love for WoH yesterday, thought I'd share:

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/1373797...