Emily M. Keeler

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Joyland News Roundup

Joyland alum Tamar Halpern’s amazing documentary, Llyn Foulkes: One Man Band (with co-director Christopher Quilty), will premiere this June 20 at the LA Film Festival.

We released a new volume of Joyland Retro with work from Amelia Gray, Roxane Gay, Jenny Halper, Jon Paul Fiorentino and more.

Joyland contributor Tamara Faith Berger won this year’s Believer Book Award.

On the Truth & Fiction podcast we spoke with James Greer about how much money he made playing in Guided by Voices, going to Broadway with Steven Soderbergh and watching Tommy with your parents.

Also: Co-publisher and rad human Emily Schultz’s newsest short story, “The Side Sleeper,” makes an appearance online in Toronto’s quirkily pedantic but totally cool mag, Taddle Creek. 

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“The second time someone told me I was dying I was 30 years old. The first time I was 23, but I was living in Montréal then and chalked up the nurse’s proclamation of my impending demise to a breakdown in language. I didn’t really believe it. The second time, I believed it, even though the surgeon hardly seemed credible in his sandals and cargo shorts and a voice most people reserve for children and dogs. I cried, but mostly I thought about getting outside so I could crack jokes with my friend about the indignity of being told I was dying by a man with Birkenstocks and bad breath.”

From Alicia Louise Merchant’s must read essay on how humor evolves in the face of cancer and mortality.  

This is an excerpt from Alicia’s longer piece on cancer and comedy (including reflections on Tig Notaro, illness as a narrative device, and the hilarious but painful indignities of the human body) in Little Brother Magazine. It is one of the finest works I’ve ever had the honour of editing. 

"The pleasure principle guides my life more than the reality principle, although I am confronted more often by reality than by pleasure."

— Edouard Levé, AUTOPORTRAIT (trans. Lorin Stein).

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This is Corey Mintz’s candy jar. I photographed it for this week’s Shelf Esteem, but it didn’t make it in.

Neither did this good little thing he said about cooking for a dinner party, which he does every week for his Fed column in the Toronto Star:

For a dinner party I’ll usually have three courses. My formula is—and this is for me, not what I’d advise other people—but I’m doing one thing that is tested, I’ve done this dish ten times, it’s a hit; one other thing that maybe I did before and it didn’t work, or maybe I did it before and now I have another way to do it, or I have an ingredient that I want to slide into it, and hopefully that dish, I’m just going to try to make it better; and a third thing that’s new. Either something I came up with, or something I’m getting directly from a book, or a recipe that a chef gave me. And that would probably be the one I write about because it’s new, it’s a challenge. And if I fail, all the better—it’s a better story. You learn more from screwing up than getting it right.

The middle act is my favourite part of any story. That’s when it’s okay for the characters to screw up, ‘cause otherwise the story would be over. So I feel like it’s okay to put yourself in a little danger in the middle part of your story.

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This is an outtake from my Shelf Esteem column this week, featuring Chuck Klosterman and his many many books. 

 

"We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float."

— From Teju Cole’s Open City. 

"I’ve eaten jelly made from small scarlet roses: its taste blesses us even as it assaults. How to reproduce the taste in words? The taste is one and the words are many."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

"Having established that he is hardly someone who would confuse low art for high, or an original insight for tediously familiar received wisdom, Wallace gives us permission to find solace in common self-help truisms without feeling that we have lost our critical faculties. In other words, he cleaves aesthetic standards from moral ones, and shows us that it is possible, and sometimes necessary, to do so."

— Elaine Blair on Infinite Jest.

"But unlike Franzen’s belligerence about “society” having a deleterious effect on art or “the soul,” or Wallace’s paralyzing concern about the relationship between writers and their television screens, Smith’s work as both a critic and novelist invites her readers to celebrate the delicious and ever disastrous commingling of the world and the self. She blurs these borders in order to simultaneously honor and disparage art’s greatest article of faith-based flapdoodle: authenticity. It is a really neat trick."

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- Emily Keeler on Zadie Smith’s NW for The New Inquiry (via thenewinquiry)

Everything I write for TNI is about Realness.

“There’s an element of solipsism to everything, darling. We are inside ourselves looking out, desperately trying to gather the evidence, trying to crack the code of this strange world that we’re thrown into. We have to be solipsistic, because we are inside ourselves. It doesn’t preclude loving people, or sympathizing with people, or hating people. Or interacting with them, to use that awful term. But we are constantly inside ourselves. Don’t get depressed about that, that’s not depressing.”

John Banville said this, and other things, to me.

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I wrote my last Text/Book column for the Standard.

It’s good to be moving on to newer things, and it’s especially great to have more time for the magazine. But I actually choked up a little when I sent this in to my editor (and friend) slash co-columnist, because I did this at least twice a month since, what, March?, and I’m gonna miss it.

"Writing’s too hard, and most of the time you feel dumb. It’s so difficult, you don’t have time to worry about being famous. That just seems like shit that happens outside."

— Salman Rushdie

Mariko Tamaki's new short story "The Convicted" is up on Joyland! Go now, because it is too good to put off. →

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Yet there was always that tone of particular indulgence, reserved for gifted women who make no pretentions and know how to keep their place in the arts: a modest second-best, no matter how good, to the next ranking male. Wescott, mentioning that both Proust and Gide wrote her letters of praise, says flatly: “For now that the inditers are both dead and gone, Colette is the greatest living French fiction writer.”

I agree to this extent: she is the greatest living French fiction writer, and that she was while Gide and Proust still lived; that these two preposterously afflicted self adoring, frankly career-geniuses certainly got in Colette’s light; they certainly diminished her standing, though not her own kind of genius. She lived in the same world, more or less in the same time—without their money or their leisure. Where they could choose their occasions, she lived on a treadmill of sheer labor. Compared to their easy road of acknowledged great literary figures, her life path was a granite cliff sown with cactus and barbed wire.

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— Katherine Anne Porter, reviewing the 1951 Short Novels of Colette, which is out of print and was presented with an introduction by Glenway Wescott. This quotation taken from the Library of America edition of Porter’s collected writings.

“Called my ex on the phone and said how about now. They said not so sure bout it, I know we’ve talked about things in the past but I’m in a strange place right now and it would be weird I think. Called everyone I know on the phone said I don’t want to be like whatever but I have a bad feeling right now.”

Stephen Thomas’s “Everyone I Know” is up on Joyland. Go read it.