Reese Okyong Kwon

Adorno, you alarm me

reesekwon — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:52:27 +0000

“Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent unimportance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.” – Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Villains, redux

reesekwon — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 22:18:52 +0000

The excellent Matt Bell published the talks from our AWP panel, “Villains, Killers, and Criminals, Oh My,” in the March Collagist. You can see the talks/thoughts/essays from Matt Bell, Eugene Cross, Brian Evenson, Lauren Groff, and me here.

AWP, AWP, AWP!

reesekwon — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:11:29 +0000

I’m speaking on two panels and giving a short reading at next week’s Chicago AWP. Here are the details:

March 1, Thursday, 12-1:15 PM
R170. Villains and Killers and Criminals, Oh My: Representing Evildoers in Literary Fiction
(with Matt Bell, Eugene Cross, Brian Evenson, & Lauren Groff)
Honoré Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, Lobby Level

March 2, Friday, 8:00 PM
Bread Loaf Waiters’ Reading, Auld Lang Syne version
(with Dara Barnat, Greg Brown, Jennine Capó Crucet, Jane Lin, Peter Mountford, Roger Reeves, Giuseppe Taurino, Ross White, & Alexi Zentner)
After-Words Bookstore, 23 E. Illinois St.

March 3, Saturday, 3-4:15 PM
Men from Venus, Women from Mars: Writing from the Perspective of the Opposite Sex
(with Jennine Capó Crucet, Alan Heathcock, Kyle Minor, & Kevin Wilson)
State Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, 4th Floor

The one weedy stalk

reesekwon — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:49:39 +0000

It’s not the story though, not the friend

leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”

which is the part of stories one never quite believes.

I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain

it must sometimes make a kind of singing.

And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—

First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

- from “Faint Music,” by Robert Hass

Too bad for marxism

reesekwon — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:20:25 +0000

“Not that I’m a marxist of any kind. I would have made a wonderful marxist if I’d been born into it, probably, which is the only way it could have stuck. Too bad for marxism. I feel toward marxists the way you feel toward Greek Orthodox people when New Year’s Eve comes and they get to go to this fantasy mass with basso priests droning, candles flaring, gold leaf all over. If only you could believe it. Also my temperament is marxist in that analytically looking for the cui bono or materialist explanation is nearly always correct in retrospect. Also I love marxist academics because it turns them into such absolute bloodhounds when it comes to critiquing actually existing capitalism. But as for the dungheap states these bouquets of humane thought have turned into as they decomposed, no thank you and again no thank you.”

- Norman Rush, Mating

The weird singing of a demiurge

reesekwon — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:20:40 +0000

“Writing a story wasn’t as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I’d find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn’t. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.”

- Leonard Michaels, Sylvia

The 25¢ press

reesekwon — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:46:51 +0000

Fitzgerald in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins:

“Would the 25¢ press keep Gatsby in the public eye,—or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers—I can maybe pick one—make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody. But to die—so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bear my stamp—in a small way I was an original.”

- from Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

Chekhov said he wrote as easily as a bird sings

reesekwon — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:10:05 +0000

“Chekhov said he wrote as easily as a bird sings. That would be nice. I’m like a bird who’s listened to all the other birds singing. Over there, in the next yard (very distant), are the songs I like. For a while I imitated them as best I could, until I figured out my own song, which I am now contentedly singing. Of course, what the bird doesn’t know (because it has a birdbrain) is that it isn’t just a matter of learning one song. You have to come up with a new song for every book. For now, I’ve got the song for this book. And that’s when it becomes fun. That’s why you don’t want to finish too quickly.”

- From an FSG “Work in Progress” interview with Jeffrey Eugenides

The space where a thought would be

reesekwon — Mon, 30 May 2011 02:55:49 +0000

“In Sappho’s poem, her addresses to gods are orderly, perfect poetic products, but the way—and this is the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.”

- From the Paris Review interview with Anne Carson

Call and Response

reesekwon — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 19:01:11 +0000

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture, it’s said, except maybe it isn’t, because what about the memorable passage in Howard’s End about Beethoven’s Fifth (“Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing”), or the ending of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” or Vinteuil’s sonata in Proust, or, or, or?

I’m very excited to be part of this April’s Call + Response line-up, in which four visual artists will create work in response to four short literary pieces, including one by yours truly. The other writers are Stuart Dybek, Naomi Ayala, and Srikanth Reddy; the artists are Amanda Burnham, Maggie Michael, Jon Bobby Benjamin, and TM Sisters. The organizers, William Bert and Kira Wisnewski, had asked for a short, previously unpublished story, and I’d been rereading “Sonny’s Blues,” which got me thinking about writing about musical performances, which reminded me of a burlesque show I’d once seen on the Lower East Side.

I’d once, long ago, tried to write about that show, and didn’t like what I had; I tried again, and turned it into the story that will be on display starting April 16th at the Hamiltonian Gallery in DC, side-by-side with what Maggie Michael makes. So! Maggie Michael’s X will in some way be inspired by my Y, which was inspired by a few burlesque dancers’ Z, which I believe is like talking about music about architecture about dancing?