John Darnielle of Mountain Goats fame has set himself quite the task: writing thirty poems about his favorite black metal band.  He's up to number thirteen so far, which ends: "I just wanna keep on loving you, great snake of the infinite void." 

If this is the sort of thing that does it for you (and why wouldn't it be?), you should check out the song "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," which is quite funny and quite moving.  It's on the album All Hail West Texas.  You can also read our review of the MG's last album, Get Lonely, here.

Monday's episode of The Show with Ze Frank was about Scrabble, a game which, like the newspaper Jumble, I am embarrassingly bad at for someone whose job it is to know about words.  Says Ze: "You're either from a Scrabble family or you're not, there's no in between. Either that board comes out at every God damned holiday get-together, or it's the butt of a perennial family joke." 

For the record, I come from a Trivial Pursuit family.

Kevin Sampsell, founder of Future Tense Books (and publisher of the amazing Susannah Breslin)  has writen up a short list of brand-spankin'-new literary terms for the West Central Tribune.  My favorites are "Austentacious: A book written in the style of, or influenced by, Jane Austen. See Emma Tennant, Karen Joy Fowler," and "Evelyn Complex: Named after Evelyn Waugh (a man), for an author with a confusing gender name. See Curtis Sittenfeld, Carson McCullers (both women)."

Coudal points us to Smith Magazine's Six-Word Memoir Contest, which is, as the name implies, a contest to write your memoir in six words.  The contest ends December 25, so there's still plenty of time to write and revise.  

My favorite so far is Shaina Feinberg's "My family is overflowing with therapists."

The Literary Review has awarded Iain Hollingshead its Bad Sex prize, which is given for writing a particularly bad sex scene in an otherwise well written novel.   Hollingshead cinched the win by employing the phrase "bulging trousers," as well as "a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles."

 Hey, write what you know.

In 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote (#341),

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

Compare Dickinson's poem to E.M. Cioran's 1937 aphorism, from Tears and Saints:

After great pain, a voluptuous feeling comes, as of infinite happiness. I agree with the saints on this point: he who has sipped the cup of suffering to its last dregs can no longer be a pessimist.

Are these two assessments at odds? What is it that follows the moment of great pain?--"a formal feeling," or a "voluptuous feeling?" Dickinson's formal feeling is serious and grave, and traces a kind of sacred stoicism in the pained consciousness. "Tombs," the reference to crucifixion, "a stone," "the Hour of Lead," and the final image of death--all of these work to describe an acute and distinct kind of fundamentally unshakeable perception. Cioran's short lines are not altogether at odds with Dickinson's; he too acknowledges the rock-bottom. But Cioran finds a kind of unreasonable happiness in this feeling, born (I presume) out of the understanding that, after great pain, "things can only get better." Dickinson's description of aftermath is in the tradition of seriousness; Cioran's stems from the absurd.

The literary artist must consciously consider how he or she will respond to questions like this: what follows great pain? And, perhaps surprisingly (to some), there are very many wrong answers. Here, again, my favorite old question of "The Truth" rears its beautiful head, and readers willing to play the comparative game must decide whether Cioran and Dickinson can both be right.

Before answering, consider some prospective first lines of my hypothetical poem:

1. After great pain, a dire feeling comes --
2. After great pain, a queasy feeling comes --
3. After great pain, an angry feeling comes --
4. After great pain, a tawdry feeling comes --
5. After great pain, a guilty feeling comes --
6. After great pain, a virile feeling comes --

Would any of these be as good as Dickinson's? I would say #1 has a chance, depending on subsquent lines, but the rest are implausible and almost immediately recognizable as ________. Something. Call it "inauthentic" or "predictable" or, if you're daring, "untrue." But this _________ should not be a throw-away concept for literary scholars simply because it is difficult to talk about and impossible to quantify. Part of the great joy of literature comes in moments of earnest disagreement over aesthetic judgment: is Dickinson's poem more "True" than Cioran's aphoristic lines?

Or, if you prefer abstruse theoretical questions: do you object to the capital T in "True?"

[crosspost] 

Su Blackwell has done a series of book-cut sculptures, slicing the pages of old books and bending, folding, and gluing them to create miniature scenes on the surfaces of the books themselves.  Su says:

As I become more involved in the making, I feel like I am creating small stage sets, inhabited by characters caught up in their own magical, whimsical and sometimes haunting journeys.

They are all very beautiful, and the flights of birds are particularly impressive, but the bibliophile in me says, "But you've ruined the books." Oh well.

[via Veer] 

Apparently, the color green is taboo on magazine covers.  I had never heard this, but the opinion is, to quote Julia Turner, pervasive:

Cindi Leive, now the editor in chief of Glamour, remembers getting into "an almost physical fight" at Self over a cover that pictured Stephanie Seymour in a dark green sweater. "I liked the cover," Leive recalled. "But my art director … not only was she screaming, she was screaming in a thick and impassioned Finnish accent and telling me that dark green was the color of death …

[via DF] 

And in staff news, Guest Blogger Casey Pratt proposed to Poetry Editor Gretchen Steele.  After a two-year courtship in which Gretchen graciously supported Casey's search for "The Truth," and Casey fended off Gretchen's continuous threats to his fish, the couple are now engaged.  Here's to you, guys.

Parents at Fond du Lac High School in Wisconsin are calling for a ban on Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the sophomore advanced reading list.  Apparently "[s]ome passages describe Angelou's rape and unwanted pregnancy." But don't worry, the internet is on the case.

Chris Ware has done five covers for the New Yorker's Thanksgiving issue.  If you look closely, there are connections between all the covers, although each one tells an individual story.  There's also an audio interview with Ware.

Enjoy your day off.

[Via DF] 

If I had been in a postin' mood yesterday I would have written about Joanna Newsom's new album, Ys, which I listened to twice Monday and twice today.  It has got to be one of the five or six best, most beautiful, intricate pop albums ever produced, and I feel that it is my solemn duty to say as many nice things about it as possible, so that you will run out and buy it as quickly as possible.

First things first: Newsom's voice draws a lot of comparisons to Bjork's, and while I'm a big Bjork fan, whenever someone makes this comparison there's always an implicit "if you're into that sort of thing."  Let me assure you, however unconventional Newsom's voice may sound at first, you are into this sort of thing.  Ys is the sort of music you have been waiting for someone to make. 

Now, there's an orchestra backing Newsom's harp-work (conducted by Van Dyke Parks), and some of the songs exceed nine minutes (most of them, in fact), but don't let any of this throw you.  The orchestra only serves to highlight the swooping, protean character of Newsom's voice, which is at one moment childlike and delicate, at the next, wizened and raw.  The songs themselves are so variable and engrossing that even "Only Skin," weighing in at sixteen minutes, seems to pass before you've even begun to grasp it.

If all of this sounds a little too, well, classical, your on the right track. There is a kind of archaic quality to the composition, but not in a cheap, Enya kind of a way (yeah, you heard me).  The music may recall centuries past, but Ys remains a distinctly 21st century pop album.  The emphasis is still on things like melody and harmony, and the interaction of words and chord changes.

How 'bout some lyrics:

Last week our picture window produced a half-word 
Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird 
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake 
And pant and labour over every intake 

I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace 
Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place 
Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you 
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view" 

Then in my hot hand 
She slumped her sick weight 
We tramped through the poison oak 
Heartbroke and inchoate

A little maudlin around the edges perhaps, taken out of context, but the overall quality of the language and vividness of the imagery ("gape like a rattlesnake") seems fairly well-done for a pop song.  The lack of the words "baby" or "sexyback" will probably turn some people off, though. 

Whenever someone tries to do something interesting with language, there is a certain portion of the population which immediately loses interest, crying "artsy" or "nonsense" or both.  In these moments I like to make a distinction between James Joyce (who I like) and Thomas Pynchon (who I don't).  Now you may prefer to reverse these examples (if you're a philistine) but what I'm getting at is there's good difficult and bad difficult, and Joanna Newsom's lyrics falls somewhere well into the good side of the spectrum.  She is evocative, moving, complicated, and enthralling, and I don't have any idea what she's talking about most of the time. 

Like Finnegans Wake, if you're into that sort of thing.

P.S. Pitchfork's got a pretty good interview with Ms. Newsom. 

Coudal linked to this collection of photos taken of the same woman over the course of ten years.  You see her alone and with various people, in seemingly various states of mind.  Coudal challenges you to look at these pictures and not write her life story in your mind.  It's tough. 

The big question is: did she wind up with the goofy-looking guy?