Mike Scalise

Come January, I’ll be taking part in a sort of high-minded thumbwrestling match between visual art and the textual kind called Call & Response, which is being curated by PIKs Kira Wisniewski and William Bert. It works like this: a bunch of writers write some things, and a bunch of visual artists create work in response to the things the writers wrote.

I’m matched with Duct-tape ninja Bryan Rojsuontikul, who’s a fellow at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Northwest DC, where this thing will be held from January 10 - Feb 13. Aside from me, the roster of writers/artists is unstoppably brainshaking: Matt Klam, Sean Carman, Tati Suarez, Joe Hall, Leah Frankel, Danika Stegeman, Mike Dax, Jen Girdish, Gerald Maa, Eleanor Graves and many many others.

11/20 UPDATE: you can follow Call & Response on Twitter here.

From the late David Foster Wallace’s “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” which remains, to date, the most accurate and nuanced depiction I’ve ever read of the fugue state of darkness that we were all forced into eight years ago:

The Yellow Pages have nothing under Flag. There’s actual interior tension: Nobody walks by or stops their car and says, “Hey, your house doesn’t have a flag,” but it gets easier and easier to imagine people thinking it. None of the grocery stores in town turn out to stock any flags. The novelty shop downtown has nothing but Halloween stuff. Only a few businesses are open, but even the closed ones are displaying some sort of flag. It’s almost surreal. The VFW hall is a good bet, but it can’t open til noon if at all (it has a bar). The lady at Burwell’s references a certain hideous Qik-n-EZ store out by 1-74 at which she was under the impression she’d seen some little plastic flags back in the racks with all the bandannas and Nascar caps, but by the time I get there they turn out to be gone, snapped up by parties unknown. The reality is that there is not a flag to be had in this town. Stealing one out of somebody’s yard is clearly out of the question. I’m standing in a Qik-n-EZ afraid to go home. All those people dead, and I’m sent to the edge by a plastic flag. It doesn’t get really bad until people ask if I’m OK and I have to lie and say it’s a Benadryl reaction (which in fact can happen)…. Until in one more of the Horror’s weird twists of fate and circumstance it’s the Qik-n-EZ proprietor himself (a Pakistani, by the way) who offers solace and a shoulder and a strange kind of unspoken understanding, and who lets me go back and sit in the stock room amid every conceivable petty vice and indulgence America has to offer and compose myself, and who only slightly later, over styrofoam cups of a strange kind of tea with a great deal of milk in it, suggests, gently, construction paper and “Magical Markers,” which explains my now-beloved homemade flag.

Also worth reading: John Hodgman’s “Welcoming Remarks Made at a Literary Reading, 9/25/01“

PIK Ryan Call (via HTMLGIANT) and my Lewisburg predecessor have been covering the recent emergence of Abramson Leslie Consulting, “the first-ever consulting firm designed exclusively for applicants to Master of Arts (M.A.), Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.), and doctorate (Ph.D.) in Creative Writing Programs.”

Here is a snippet of Ryan’s post at HTMLGIANT:

[...] due to some “legal issues,” whatever those were, Fellner decided to delete his criticism of ALC; fortunately, this was an ineffective, though no less meaningful act, as the post is still widely available online (not Fellner’s fault). Thanks to Google, you may read Fellner’s post, titled “Why a Creative Writing ‘Firm’ May be the Most Unethical Entity in the Literary Community At Large,” either as a page in Google’s cache or in your Google Reader (simply follow Fellner’s blog, Pansy Poetics, and the post will show up in the feed). Here’s a tidbit from Fellner’s post, in which he questions the firm’s basic concept:

Or am I reading this “under construction” website wrong? Am I supposed to read this as a parody? As a satire of the idea that one should ethically manipulate their art to receive possible help from other poets and fiction writers? Is the firm also broadly mocking Kaplan Education Centers? Where students pay a tidy fee to improve their test scores? Where test scores are considered to be the measure of excellence? Is the firm ridiculing the inherent nature of MFA programs? That within colleges, institutions that offer grades, art is something that be measured and assessed with perfunctory, mechanical accuracy?

Look: other than a curiosity about the distinct lack of “creative nonfiction” consulting services offered by Abramson Leslie (perhaps we all know how to get into MFA and PhD programs all by ourselves?) I categorically have no public opinion on these matters.

If you do, however, I encourage you to leave them, anonymously or not, either on this blog, HTMLGIANT, or in the comments section of Seth Abramson’s blog, the Suburban Ecstasies (relevant post here).

HTMLGIANT: Abramson Leslie Consulting v. Steve Fellner (link)

Lorca Lorca: Steve Fellner on Seth Abramson’s Creative Writing Firm (link)

The Suburban Ecstasies: [ALC] (link)

Abramson Leslie Consulting (link)