Toluu

pshares blog

ramblings, gossip, and disinformation about the literary world from the staff readers and editors of Ploughshares

blog contributors: Elisa Gabbert, Simeon Berry, Laura van den Berg, Kathleen Rooney, and Matt Salesses.

Blog-ojevichJanuary 5

One of the uses of literature (not that it has to always Have an Obvious Use) is to help people cultivate their stores of empathy and fellow feeling. It can remind us of the humanity and struggles of those who might not at first glimpse have much in common with ourselves. One of the individuals who most people, at least in Illinois, probably hope they do not have too much in common with is our amazingly sucky governor, Rod Blagojevich.

For years, he’s been little more than a cartoon of a man whose ridiculousness rivaled only his capacity to disappoint the people he was supposed to serve. But back in September 2002, Chicago Public Radio’s Steve Edwards spoke to the then-gubernatorial-hopeful in an interview where the idea was to have the candidate talk anything but politics. So they discussed his love of jogging and his prodigious skills of memorization, which he demonstrated both by listing various U S Presidents in order, and by reciting the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, which he cited as a kind of personal motto. Part of it goes:

EventideDecember 31 2008

Now, as this last miserable year grinds to a close, I thought I’d snatch some last 2008 tidbits out of the ether, before unplanned obsolescence (the lifeblood of the internet in general and blogs in specific) take hold.


Gabriel repurposed the most ineradicable of internet memes--the cat:

how i feel about poetry



sitting on machine i don't understand
cannot make it speak/fly/produce food/pet.me


Nin Andrews managed a bit of brilliant urban camouflage:

I am at the mall, and I have lost all interest or memory of why I am there. (I always do this at malls. It takes twenty minutes, and then I am out of my body. I am floating around, watching the other shoppers shop, the sellers sell, the mothers tug their children and large bags, the fathers wander off aimlessly like fish in the air . . . ) Some man hands me a card and puts out his hand for money. It

New Voices: Andrew Foster AltschulDecember 30 2008

Andrew Foster Altschul is the author of the novel Lady Lazarus. His short fiction and essays have appeared in publications including Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Fence, One Story, StoryQuarterly, and anthologies such as Best New American Voices 2006 and O. Henry Prize Stories 2007. He is also the books editor of The Rumpus.net, a new arts & culture website. A former music journalist and rock DJ, he currently lives in San Francisco.

Your story, y = mx +b, recently appeared in the Winter 2008-09 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Jean Valentine. Where did the idea for this story come from?

I have to confess that this story had a more or less personal basis, though I don’t like to write about my own life. But I went through a few months about a year ago where absolutely everything was going wrong, one thing after another – my dog was very sick, my landlord – a very sweet man – died and his widow was thinking about selling the building, there was a crazy student threatening me, my car broke down, my publishing house had begun its slow disintegration just as my book

New Year's ResolutionsDecember 26 2008

Happy Holidays! Here are my literary New Year's Resolutions:

1. Write a draft of my novel. And revise that draft.

2. Stop nitpicking (this can also be non-literary).

3. Read more. Books, specifically. Stop wasting time on-line.

4. Stop upsetting my fiancee with my prose. (Maybe not.)

5. Make my characters nosier. And noisier.

I'm curious what other people plan for next year... and whether those plans ever work out.

30-second recommendationDecember 26 2008

The January issue of Harper's is really bringing it: The "Readings" section alone has excerpts by Charles Bernstein, Diane Williams, Susan Sontag, poems by John Ashbery and Rae Armantrout (AND two visual poems), George Saunders and Don DeLillo on David Foster Wallace, etc. There's also sex-themed "Findings" ("Roosters that have had sex recently make more noise at dawn") and a rather Big Lebowski-esque short story by Heidi Julavits:

      "How appropriate," I said. "And what if a man asks you to kill another man just because he thinks he's an asshole?"
      "It's not my job to evaluate motive," he said.
      "You'll just kill anyone," I said.
      "Not anyone," he said cryptically. "But let me ask you. Would it be so terrible if an asshole died? Think of how little sense it makes when generous, lovely people die. But when an asshole dies, we think, well, hmmmm. An asshole is dead."
      Our conversation lagged.

How does the New Yorker sleep at night knowing Harper's exists?

The January Lucky, on the other hand, though usually dependable airplane "reading," kind of sucked. I blame the economy.