It’s My Two Cents: Mayer, Naropa, Huth, Pritts, Oral, Three Things That Piss Me Off About The Rumpus
[admin / February 19th, 2010 / Young Bright Things ]
If Jane Mayer could look more smug when she is not talking in her recent television appearances, she would explode in a flameball of contemptuousness. Â Super reporter, though…I don’t know what Google Buzz is, but evidently it’s a hit…
I own a copy of Tom Clark’s The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, and it is, indeed juicy poetry gossip, what with W.S. Merwin, Ginsberg and other figuring into it. Â Why isn’t it back in print?…Ethan Hawke is still hot…So is Kim Addonizio, as are her poems…
So far Geof Huth and Nate Pritts have visited my Oral Interpretation of Lit class at The College of Saint Rose, and both times they have read/performed beautifully; check out my students’ readings of them and others here…
Ah, to know the twists and turns of tautology and aphoristic egoblogspeak…Ah, to join up with others who know same to build platforms and presences…O, how simple it was in the late 90s to start an online journal and email people…Alack! what one could have done if one had not contracted founder’s syndrome…
Three things have pissed me off over at The Rumpus, which I usually love, lately… The first was Steve Almond and his former student making fun of the students in their old workshop. You just don’t do that, it’s icky, and it goes against all implied ethics of of the writing workshop and even academe. It’s called college for a reason; one is collegial; get it?…
The second was Vanessa Garcia’s snarky, reductionist review of my friend Kathleen Rooney’s essay collection For You, For You, I am Trilling These Songs. Part of the hazard in writing about this type of nonfiction is that dumbass reviewers will realize that what they have on their hands is a real live, “unsurrogated narrator” (Vivian Gornick’s term), and wowsa! They get to play ad hominem don’t-pile-on-the-rabbit games on all review long. It’s a made bed many nonfictionists lie in, and leads to being called a “schoolgirl.” Unconscionable…
The third is whoever “Gladys” is over in the comment boxes calling me “ten years behind” in essay studies for the horrible suggestion that perhaps an essayist should get his or her facts straight on a subject before waxing all lyrical about it. Bull to the shit. You want to write about something? Look it up, yo. So anyway, like some Silliman’s Blog douchebag, I engaged in comment box trench warfare. See it ongoing here….
Did I say I love WordPress? I love WordPress…I promise not to make fun of fat people if my latest gym-going spurt results in me getting down to my wedding day weight. You read it here first…
Daniel Nester‘s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.
Oh, I hate it when I get sucked into comment box warfare! My sympathies.
And I agree with you about Ethan Hawke and Kim Addonizio and how uncool it is to bust on students in a public forum.
I’m with you on Garcia’s review. Lazy, shallow, facile.
I totally agree about the Garcia review. I found it to be just shallow and simplistic and totally… beside the point. It reflected far more poorly on the reviewer than anything else.
With the Almond thing, I found the same smugness you often see when people talk about workshops. It is a cliche of a cliche at this point to make fun of fellow workshoppers. So lacking in originality.
I liked the Almond/Mulgrew interview. Sure, they were slagging off other students, but they were slagging off themselves too. It seemed to me that they were saying “we’re all shit writers, but we’re shit in different ways”.