The Rise of “un Autre”

New Shoes on a Dead Horse
Sierra DeMulder
Write Bloody Publishing

At the end of 2011, as if to round out the year, someone named @criticmichiko joined Twitter and began posting scathing, pretentious reviews of household objects, pizza crusts, and baby names: “It is with frustration that the reader tries to affix the new Swiffer pad to the Swiffer base. The user’s manual is self-indulgent blather.” A parody aimed at the scathing, pretentious New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, @criticmichiko now has nearly a thousand followers. After another account, @ActualNYTMK, joined Twitter and demanded that the parody take the account offline, and then proceeded to accuse @colsonwhitehead of masterminding the whole thing, the Twittersphere was too amused to care whether or not @ActualNYTMK was, indeed, the actual Michiko Kakutani or simply another parody account.

In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books published last weekend, novelist Matthew Specktor examined not only this specific phenomenon but its ramifications—the fruits of social networking itself. Our identities, with few exceptions, are filtered through this media: “On Twitter, or Facebook, we serve ourselves up in miscellaneous detail, presenting our epigrams and aphorisms and photographs, our urbane or intemperate responses to others… Consciously or otherwise, we stretch ourselves into flattering (even if, at times, deliberately ugly) postures: We spend time trying to curate, to use that buzzy term, ourselves. Or ‘selves.’” It’s this other “self” that interests Specktor, and he goes on to admit that, despite the extent to which we’ve taken it, it’s nothing new: “Je est un autre. Rimbaud’s notorious observation has become a prescription. Every last one of us has become someone else, at least one person, by now.” For an artist, there has always been un autre—the fragmentation of the person who calls herself an artist and the artist herself who creates the art. Art itself—even our most personal art—is filtered in a far more meticulous and intricate way than our 140-character epigrams. Art is the organization of the personal into the persona. The artist is as much our creation as the art itself.

Growth in Possibility

Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again
Tony Rauch
Eraserhead Press, 2010

Even as an unseasoned critic, MCB is aware of the pitfalls one faces when reviewing young and/or emerging writers. S/he is either rife with exciting potential, or emblematic (this is the exact word one uses) of his or her generation, or both. Tony Rauch, with his third collection, Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again, proves to be both, yet this isn’t a pitfall. Rauch is one of those authors for whom reviews like this are reserved—for whom they were formulated in the first place. His work is exciting, and his ability to inhabit his protagonists’ heads betrays a deep understanding of gens X and Y.

When MCB was young(er), MCB lived in a basement with a strange electrical system, and whenever MCB played the guitar there was a slight electric current on the strings. It was nothing you’d want to rest your naked wrist against, but to calloused fingertips it was devilishly thrilling. That’s what Rauch’s work is like—a teenage boy playing guitar with a slight shiver, because it’s a voice that needs to be heard, and a voice that one doesn’t expect to be so engaging. Except Eyeballs is more like that boy reflecting on his days of guitar playing, maybe ten or twenty years later, after he’s lived enough to inflate those days with meaning.

A New Publisher’s Debut

Get In If You Want to Live
John Jodzio
Paper Darts Press, 2011

Get In (To this Launch Party) If You Want to Live
Honey, NE Minneapolis
Saturday, October 15, 2011

Chances are, if you’re aware of MCB, you’re aware of the local literary magazine Paper Darts. It therefore goes without saying that their foray into a full publishing press, gorgeous first book, and resulting launch party will also be familiar to you. However, one must acknowledge the possibility—as remote as it may be—that an MCB reader, though familiar with MCB, has never heard of Paper Darts. Why anyone would wish to imagine such a scenario is better left to the creative machinations of Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks. MCB, for one, cannot live in such a world. The aforementioned foray, book, and party are inarguable reasons for MCB readers to agree.

Several months ago, the three headed octopus down in the belly of Paper Darts pushing all the buttons and wrapping its tentacles around all the levers announced that the magazine would be publishing their first book, joining the ranks of Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, Milkweed Editions, and other local publishing houses. That book would be local author John Jodzio’s second short story collection, Get In If You Want to Live. On Saturday night, dreams of both mollusk and man came true while over a hundred people huddled down together at Honey in Northeast Minneapolis to drink, support local artists, and laugh until their diaphragms protested as Jodzio read from his new collection.

A word on the book.

The Splendor of the Creative Process

Craig Thompson Discusses Habibi
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Monday, September 26, 2011

MCB has a friend. Joel is a good name. Joel had always been interested in writing, going so far as to write “novels” when he was in fourth grade. When Joel graduated high school and enrolled at the University of Minnesota, he spasmed at the opportunity to take Intro to Creative Writing—a course with a unique structure. Instead of the standard professor lecture/TA discussion dynamic, the Intro to Creative Writing Course at the University of Minnesota is structured as a series of guest lectures. Local and national writers are invited to read their work, share their creative process, and answer questions. Joel was lucky, in that regard: access to all these writers so early in his career was invaluable, not to mention extraordinary.

Joel skipped class a lot. He deeply, deeply regrets it. MCB has confirmed this.

MCB hopes the students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design are not so dismissive and unappreciative of these opportunities. MCB hopes that the students in attendance at Craig Thompson’s discussion of Habibi on Monday night soaked up everything that Thompson spilled over them. The reason for this is simple: Craig Thompson is a genius.

Life and Literature after 9/11

Minneapolis Granta Launch
The Loft Literary Center
Thursday, September 8, 2011

In a startling move toward intimacy, the lights are dimmed in the Loft’s auditorium. Fourteen or fifteen chairs are brought up to the front of the room. MPR reporter Marianne Combs folds her hands and looks over her notes—a legal pad with script running edge to edge. Granta Magazine, she is saying, has the reputation of being one of the premier literary magazines not only in this country but in the world. It’s from Combs that we—the audience—learn that writers such as Bill Bryson, Zadie Smith, and Arundhati Roy have landed their debut pieces in Granta, which only highlights the magazine’s ability to seek out spectacular new talent. They call themselves “the quarterly magazine,” the assertiveness of which—let’s call it assertiveness—is more charming than it is malevolent.

The Search for the Literary Mecca

What bookish type hasn’t had a fleeting fancy of moving to New York? The so-called Book Capital of the World, the city is legendary for its literary history. In today’s New York, scores of writers are taking root in Brooklyn, driven out of Manhattan by high rent and commercialization. Brooklyn—they say it’s the new Mecca for writers, a place where book stores thrive, where—unless you’re capable of tearing the fabric of space-time—you literally cannot attend every reading. It sounds delightful.

It’s because of this reputation that the mention of bookish New York has always struck a chord with the rest of the country, whether it be a chord of inspiration or a chord of aggravation. Not everyone wants to move to New York. Why, we wonder, should New York get all the glory? Sure it’s the locus of almost every major publisher and literary agent. Sure it’s where the majority of our nation’s top writers live. But is there really something intrinsic about New York that instills within writers some kind of literary spirit?

Tom Lutz of the Los Angeles Review of Books doesn’t think so.

An Unintentional Career in Retail

Upcoming Event:
Caitlin Kelly Reads from her memoir, Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail
Magers & Quinn
Thursday, August 11, 7:30 p.m.

Although it would certainly take all the frustration out of life if you really did grow up to be a firefighter or an astronaut or a dragon, it would also suck the surprise out of every moment. New York based author Caitlin Kelly was surprised, when the recession hit, to find herself making the unintentional and very unwanted switch from journalism to retail. After losing her job as a reporter for the New York Daily News, Kelly worked for 27 months at The North Face at an upscale mall in White Plains, NY. It was that surprise, however, that led to the crafting of a memoir. Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail is Kelly’s account of what it means to make $11/hr at the age of 50—her first low wage job since high school—as well as an examination of the recession’s effect on the third largest industry in the United States, which is of course its largest source of new and less than desirable jobs. Kelly draws from her own experience as well as that of her peers to show us just how nightmarish the retail life can be. Entertainment Weekly called it “an excellent memoir” while USA Today declared Kelly “a first rate researcher and storyteller.”

Kelly will be reading from her memoir at Magers & Quinn on Thursday, August 11, at 7:30 p.m. MCB was able to get in touch with her and ask a few questions.

Because Literary Diversity is What We Live For

The Twin Cities GLBTQ Writer’s Group
Meeting every first Monday at 7:00 p.m.
The Loft Literary Center
Third Floor Book Club Room

MCB has already established two facts about the Twin Cities:
• We’re home to an extraordinarily supportive network of writers and bookish types
• We happen to have one of the strongest queer literary scenes in the country

Today, MCB will solder together those two facts into one new fact: the Twin Cities GLBTQ Writer’s Group is there for you, you being a writer and you being some shade of queer¹.

Breaking Down those Complicated Relationships

The MN Publishing Tweet Up
Wednesday, July 20
Clubhouse Jäger

The focus, lately, has been community. Though really, when it comes to writers and the book-minded, does the subject ever stray from community? Again, as isolated as we are in our profession and our practices, we’re still very social creatures. We learned that with the talented Hazel and Wren. Today we are going to learn about another extension of the Twin Cities literary community: The MN Publishing Tweet Up.

MCB would like to say that it takes place on x Wednesday of the month, or every x weeks, but unfortunately this wonderful opportunity is still flicking its moistened wings to test out the weather. Regardless, the MN Publishing Tweet Up is a wonderful opportunity, and not only for writers, but for editors, publishers, agents, and just about everyone else who lives and dies by the book¹.

A Book Lover’s Anxiety

One never wants to begin with a cliché. Surely, when we say that ignorance is bliss, our first authorial instinct is to cross it out and think of another way to say it. That’s what a writer would do, in fact. If there’s anything we learn from books it’s to recognize what has been said before. But that’s the darling thing about clichés: they carry more connotations that your average sentence, baggage hidden within each reader. Ignorance is bliss, when you think about it.

Most of us read the news. It doesn’t matter where we get it, as long as it’s news, even though when we say news what we really mean is updates. Here’s what’s changed about this war, here’s what hasn’t, here’s what you’re paying at the gas pump and here’s why, here’s what might lead to a new war, here’s why we’re too nihilistic to take war seriously these days.

One’s tempted to say we’d be better off not reading the news.