60 WRITERS / 60 PLACES

This amazing new film by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball will be screened on Saturday, December 12 at PPOW Gallery in New York City. I am one of the 60, shot in a lighthouse reading three sentences from my novel in progress. I'm honored to be in the company of Kate Blackwell, Jennifer Firestone, Gary Lutz, Eileen Myles, Rick Moody, and many other great writers.

More collaborations by Dipierro and Kimball at Little Burn Films.

Mountains. Writing.

I will teach a fiction workshop called "Story Lab" in Asheville, NC, starting in mid-February. Emphasis on experiments, invention, risk-taking. Writers of all stripes, camps, schools, and persuasions welcome. Details at the Great Smokies Writing Program website.

Of praise and disdain

From Thomas Mann's memoir The Story of a Novel (1961):

We all bear wounds; praise is a soothing if not necessarily healing balm for them. Nevertheless, if I may judge by my own experience, our receptivity for praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than the opposite. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength. On the other hand, praise is a food that swiftly satiates, swiftly excites repugnance; the erecting of inner defenses against it is soon completed, and probably it would be best therefore if we heard neither good nor evil concerning our affairs.

The Difficult Farm

Heather Christle is a killer poet. Her first collection, The Difficult Farm, is out from Octopus Books. It is not in my hands yet, but it soon will be.

The cayenne

The powder form of chili pepper has been used for centuries to treat chronic pain, earache, fever, gangrene, headache, heart disease, nausea, nosebleed, poor circulation, sore throat, and toothache. Ayurvedic and Chinese-medicine practitioners prescribe it for digestive ailments.

Europeans once believed it could cure the skin disease scrofula, known as “the King's evil.”

In 1832, an herbalist named Samuel Thompson wrote of the cayenne: “It is no doubt the most powerful stimulant known; its power is entirely congenial to nature, being powerful in raising and maintaining heat, on which life depends ... I consider it essentially a benefit, for its effects on the glands causes the saliva to flow freely and leaves the mouth clean and moist.”

The wild heat in this fruit of the Capsicum annuum plant comes from a substance called capsaicin, which is an irritant to humans, producing a burning sensation in any tissue it touches. Capsaicin blocks or depletes substance P, a chemical involved in transmitting pain impulses to the brain.

A Beleaguered "Best of"

Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Books of 2009 includes no female authors. Does the list show gender bias, or is its all-male roster simply a fluke? And what about PW's Top 100, which honors 71 titles by men and 29 by women?

From Susan Steinberg's "On Disturbance" at The Rumpus:

One could argue (and several have) that perhaps the editors just liked these books best. Or that, perhaps, one could argue (and too many have), it was yet another “bad year” for women writers. Though perhaps it was something else entirely. The PW editor explains in her short accompanying text that the deciders of the Best 10 list “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Which is kind of brilliant in a way. Because everyone knows if you ignore things—like how I sometimes try to ignore the homeless guy who blocks my path when I’m walking to work, because it’s just too much to deal with in the morning—you can maybe make those things go away.

From Laura Miller's "A 10-best books list without women?" at Salon.com:

Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

On the other hand, few things are more subjective than judgments about how "great" any given book is. Those real, long-standing cultural biases mentioned above live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.

From Lizzie Skurnick's "Same Old Story: Best-Books Lists Snub Women Writers" at Politics Daily:

But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people—male or female—think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don't know . . . deserve them.

The just-launched organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) has set up a wiki inventory of great books published by women in 2009. Anyone can add a title to the roll-call.