Writing today

A standard-issue comment about anthologies is that they’re “uneven” but Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (2005) seems almost intended to elicit that comment by editor Kevin Smokler. There’s a piece by Dan Kennedy that’s so worthless that I would have considered it unpublishable if, in fact, it hadn’t been published. There’s also a tedious poem by Nico Cary, a meanderingly pointless collaboration by Kelley Eskridge & Nicola Griffith, and unforgettably a memoir of sorts by Paul Flores that seems like a spoken word artist parody complete with howlingly awful examples like “My language is STRONG like struggle.” Only it’s depressing to realize he’s completely serious. Some of the mildly interesting pieces seem tossed off. Douglas Rushkoff tries to promote the brave new cyberworld but anecdotes are not evidence; I think he’s more or less right overall--and is pleasant enough anyway--but even I’m not convinced by the piece. Tara Bray Smith covers marginalia (fascinating for somebody like me who simply can not write in a book, any book), Robert Lanham does an amusing even if completely obvious satire on the McSweeney’s crowd and Michelle Richmond’s remembrance of her MFA years deserves expansion. The real surprise for me is Paul Collins talking about reading decades worth of Notes and Queries, mainly because I had stumbled across N&Q a few years ago and thought that nobody except its contributors ever knew about it. Now I want to investigate it more thoroughly: Library here I come…