A Tree Sandwich (and hold the pickle)

Superior Person's Tuesday (or, ahem, Wednesday)

Sesquipedalian adj. Inordinately long (of words). Literally, a foot and a half long — hence, a word of that length. As a noun: an inveterate user of such words; a practitioner of the lore contained in this book; a word-grubber. (q.v.)

And their cheers are still catchy.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Sesquipedalian appears in the first.

Harry Matthews' The Journalist

from the blog With Hidden Noise:

“Another book of metafiction, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder approaches the same subject as The Journalist from a different direction, less concerned with character and more concerned with form; there’s a similar progression in that book, and it’s a bit surprising that I’ve never seen the two books compared. To my mind, Mathews’s book is superior because it’s more human, pointing out the unreconcilable contradiction between art and life. Mathews’s book is more concerned with text and its ineluctable linearity which forces narratives upon lives. McCarthy’s characters purposefully feel more like puppets, at service to a greater artistic program: this is purposeful, but the human cost of art is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out.”

Buy The Journalist from the Godine website

Cheyenne Madonna @ The Irish Examiner

by David O'Mahoney at The Irish Examiner:

“Chuculate, a well-travelled journalist, writes with a warm informality. The tone is often conversational and never art for art’s sake. This gives the reader a greater sense that the characters are people, not just pictures on the page.

He also has a knack for words that just fit.

When Jordan describes his assault trial ‘a Mickey Mouse, kangaroo clusterf**k of proceedings,’ given how much attention the Indian legal system has given it, you feel that, for all its vulgarity, it is simply the right word for the job. But he can conjure up wonderful dramatic imagery as well. When he describes a forming tornado as ‘three skinny dancing ropes’ that ‘dropped from the wall of bruised clouds,’ you have a tight sense of what it must be like to be caught in a storm the likes of which you have never seen.

Chuculate has already made an impact with his short story work.

His ‘Galveston Bay, 1826’, the sort of origin tale that opens Cheyenne Madonna, won the PEN / O. Henry awards in 2007, putting him alongside previous winners such as Stephen King and William Faulkner. This collection shows it was no flash in the pan victory, but rather a sign of things to come.”

Digging the Postpunk Feminism

Eileen Myles

listen up fools — Jezebel sez:

“Eileen Myles is ‘the rock star of modern poetry’ (BUST Magazine) and ‘a cult figure to a generation of post-punk female writer-perfomers’ (The New York Times) and we think that means that she's super-honest and unafraid to get ugly or dirty or otherwise f*cked up. An East Village fixture with a working-class Boston background, she's worked as Artistic Diretor of the St.Mark's Poetry project, toured with Sister Spit and performed all around the world including at the Poetry Project, P.S. 122 and the WOW Café. Also she's published like 15 books and has a ‘poet's novel,’ INFERNO, coming out this fall. Her memoir Chelsea Girls is one of Emily Gould's favorites.”

So grab these Black Sparrow titles while you still can:

Wesley McNair: Process and Poetry

At the Colby College Special Collections, which houses Wesley McNair's papers, a new website has been launched that offers some amazing insight into the process of poetry. You can read and listen to the poem in its final version, and browse pages of manuscript. Look at these notebook pages for the poem “How I Became a Poet” (from Lovers of the Lost)

The site includes dozens of poems in this form, as well as biographical and critical resources for teachers and poetry lovers alike. Congratulations to Colby on this wonderful project!

Superior Person's Tuesday

Rufous adj. Coloured a dullish red or rusty reddish-brown. Reserve the term strictly for use in circumstances where someone named Rufus has just come in from working in the garden. Be patient. At least once in your life, this will happen.

The Rufous Rufus Sewell. That just feels right.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Rufous appears in the third.

Cheyenne Madonna @ Pasatiempo

from a review by Jennifer Levin
at The Santa Fe New Mexican

“Chuculate presents a profound disconnect between the mythology of Indian art and the present-day reality of Indian artists, who rarely get to be artists without the cultural qualifier. He also lays bare the effects of wide-spread multi-generational addiction without making excuses for the way his characters treat each other. There are no saints in here, and no demons, either. Cheyenne Madonna is a fantastic debut.”

Buy Cheyenne Madonna from the Black Sparrow website!

Slight Consolation

Seriously, how do you even
turn this thing on?

from Robert Pinsky at The New York Times:

“The story begins with money. Johannes Gutenberg did not find a way to profit from his technical achievements. The Gutenberg Bible, a gigantic project, required large amounts of capital that needed replenishing over time, long before there was any hope of profit. The finished product inspired awe, but the print run was 180 copies. Gutenberg “died bankrupt and disappointed.”

Nor was he alone. Apparently, it took decades before some people figured out how to make money from this remarkable invention. For decades after Gutenberg, it was not even clear that print would become a success. How do you market books? How many should you run off at one time? Piracy was a problem, as were texts changed, mutilated or combined in unauthorized editions. Many printers were ruined, trying to exploit the new medium.”