The current banner image for this blog and for Celestial Timepiece is taken from HubbleSite, run for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute. STScI titles the image “Cone Nebula (NGC 2264): Star-Forming Pillar of Gas and Dust,” and further describes it as “a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea”—as if this were not obvious to anyone familiar with nightmarish beasts. Or crimson seas.

Though some have deemed Joyce Carol Oates’s writing to be astronomical in scope, they may not have realized that some of her work is astronomical in theme as well:

Corky’s fascination with cosmology in the Pulitzer-finalist What I lived For; the story “The Radio Astronomer” from Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque; the poem “The Triumph of Gravity” from Tenderness; and of course Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, with chapter titles such as “A Short History of the Heavens” and “Ocean Of Storms. Sea Of Tranquility. Lake Of Dreams. Lake Of Death.”

JCO notes that “Looking into the depths of the sky, we are looking into Time: the stars of distant galaxies that seem to us so beautiful, so fraught with meaning beyond our human ability to comprehend, are in fact not there, but, long extinct; even our own sun is eight minutes into what astronomers call look-back time. Maddy Wirtz, the chronicler of the Foxfire Confessions, in adulthood an astronomer’s assistant, is only able to tell her story through the prism of look-back time—’Undertaken now because I have the proper telescopic instrument.’ Which is to say, the perspective of Time.”

Ace anthologist Ellen Datlow—called “the premiere horror editor of her generation” by Publisher’s Weekly—has announced in her blog the contents of the The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 which will include Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Valentine, July Heat Wave.” The story was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and later collected in The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense. This is JCO’s 10th entry in this anthology over the last 21 years. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 is due out in the Fall.

For its 85th anniversary issue, Weird Tales magazine has compiled a list of The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years. Of Joyce Carol Oates, they note that she is “arguably the darkest and weirdest writer to be fully embraced by the mainstream since Poe himself….” The magazine’s definition of “storyteller” is broad, including such weirdoes as David Bowie & Kate Bush, Tim Burton & David Lynch, Franz Kafka & Dr. Seuss. Weird Tales was spawned in 1923 and is accused of launching the careers of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian). Originally buried in 1954, the magazine attempted to rise several times between then and the late eighties when it began creeping people out more-or-less continuously to the present day with grotesquery from Tanith Lee, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and others. Surprisingly, JCO has never had an original story in Weird Tales; perhaps that will change.

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men in the New York Review of Books: “Beginning with its risky yet playful title, All the Sad Young Literary Men is a rueful, undramatic, mordantly funny, and frequently poignant sequence of sketch-like stories loosely organized by chronology and place and the prevailing theme of youthful literary ideals vis-à-vis literary accomplishment. In its seriocomic depiction of post-adolescent ennui it will remind some readers of Indecision (2005), the first novel by Benjamin Kunkel, Keith Gessen’s co-editor at n+1; clearly, both young writers speak the same language, if not precisely the same dialect. Its cover art suggests a witty New Yorker cartoon: a small male figure at the very bottom of a page bearing on his back and shoulders an immense black tombstone of a book titled ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN.”

“What is the worst thing that can happen?”

Lisa, from the long-running TV show The Simpsons, imagines herself in prison on the March 23, 2008 episode. The guard arrives with the book mobile …

Lisa: “Got any Joyce Carol Oates?”
Guard: “Nope, it’s all Danielle Steele.”

Now that’s a rough prison. (Thanks to TVRecapMatt)

Woundedness, Rejection and Inspiration

Tammy Ayer reports on Joyce Carol Oates’s visit to Sanibel Island, Florida for the News-Press: “Oates’ hectic schedule didn’t surprise Tom DeMarchi, an instructor in the department of language and literature at Florida Gulf Coast University … I said to her, ‘You are so prolific. You must write eight hours a day to do all you do.’ She looked at me in almost a pitying way and said, ‘Oh, that would be a short day.’” Ayer notes that JCO’s current project is “The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection and Inspiration,” featur[ing] her essays on famous authors and the many kinds of rejection they suffered, not only from skeptical publishers but also from family, friends and fellow authors.”

Six-Word Memior

Smith Magazine is publishing a book of “six-word memoirs” by “famous and not-so-famous folks,” including JCO’s contribution, which can be found all over the web:

“Revenge is living well, without you.”

Smith Magazine offers the “Story behind the Six: Joyce Carol Oates.”

With the passing of its editor, Raymond J. Smith, Ontario Review itself will cease publication with the forthcoming Spring 2008 issue. Smith began Ontario Review in 1974 in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife Joyce Carol Oates as associate editor; the Review later moved with its editors to Princeton, NJ.

Smith wrote about the impetus for Ontario Review:

I was simply intrigued by the idea of a little magazine. Not a glossy magazine—never—but a little magazine. (Not too little: the original Kenyon Review, say. Remember those gorgeous covers?) I was fascinated from about the age of eighteen onward by the notion, the abstract, almost Platonic notion, of a physical thing that was at the same time a communal phenomenon. That is, one picks up a magazine, weighs it in the hand, it appears to be a thing, but in fact it isn’t a thing at all. It’s a symposium. A gathering. A party. —“On Editing The Ontario Review”

Reviewing the literary magazine for Library Journal in 1976, Bill Katz commented, “the style is as relaxed as it is meaningful, and the review is not burdened with dense scholarly prose whose primary appeal is to the expert. No, this is [for] the average intelligent reader who seeks a professional, honest approach to the arts … and for once there is a solid balance between ‘names’ and lesser known figures of equally high standards.” Katz returned his attention to Ontario Review on its 15-year anniversary, noting, “Little wonder this is one of our best reviews.”

Little wonder Ontario Review, like its editor, will be sorely missed.

p.s. — A partial listing of contributors to Ontario Review, from its web site:

Alice Adams, Jane Anderson, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, Pinckney Benedict, Earle Birney, Joseph Brodsky, Hayden Carruth, Raymond Carver, Annie Dillard, Rita Dove, Margaret Drabble, Stuart Dybek, Carlos Fuentes, Tess Gallagher, Albert Goldbarth, Nadine Gordimer, Eaman Grennan, Donald Hall, William Heyen, Ted Hughes, Josephine Jacobsen, Jill Krementz, Maxine Kumin, Irving Layton, Doris Lessing, Alistair MacLeod, W. S. Merwin, Mary Morris, Barry Moser, Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Alicia Ostriker, Jay Parini, Stanley Plumly, Reynolds Price, Ned Rorem, Philip Roth, Dave Smith, Gary Soto, Elizabeth Spencer, William Stafford, Mark Strand, Deborah Tannen, Melanie Rae Thon, Chase Twichell, John Updike, David Wagoner, Robert Penn Warren, Tom Wayman, Theodore Weiss, C. K. Williams, and Charles Wright

I have learned, with great sadness, of the death of Raymond J. Smith, who was for more than 30 years editor of Ontario Review, as well as Ontario Review Press; and for more than 45 years beloved husband of Joyce Carol Oates. JCO wrote frequently and lovingly of Ray in her recently published Journal.

Ray’s thoughts, both practical and philosophical, on publishing a literary magazine can be found in “On Editing The Ontario Review.”

In her article “Nighthawk: A Memoir of Lost Time,” JCO recounts her life as a graduate student during the time when she met and married Ray. Mostly about her difficulties with insomnia and the academic culture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the article by the end reveals its glowing secret heart to be Ray.

JCO took Ray’s name as the basis of one of her pen names, Rosamond Smith, under which she wrote mystery-thrillers all dealing with twins, doubles, soul-mates.

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller on Raymond Smith: “he worked behind the scenes on the magazine, and as Oates’ protector and shield, her sounding board and soul mate. “

Obituary: New York Times

Fifty years ago (1958), Joyce Carol Oates published the short story “Rapport” in Syracuse 10, the undergraduate literary magazine at Syracuse University where she was majoring in English. The year before, JCO had two stories in the magazine’s earlier incarnation, Syracuse Review. These three stories, along with a high-school story from 1956, make up JCO’s first published works.

Greg Johnson’s Invisible Writer notes JCO’s uncertainty about her stories’ dark subject matter and its possibly negative impact on a future career: “‘I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of a great deal of some really vicious writing of mine which has been published in relationship to the future,’ she wrote, referring to her Syracuse 10 stories. Surprisingly, she considered it ‘quite likely that I will not be doing too much writing anymore.’”

Her reconsideration, and fifty years of hard work, have made JCO “one of the greatest literary forces of our time” (American Poetry Review, Jan/Feb 2008).

Blogger Elizabeth Howard presents a strangely angry depiction of Joyce Carol Oates’s appearance at Fairfield University on Sunday. The afternoon event is presented as a would-be ambush by Professor “Buttercup,” an “eminent nobody” whose puny attack is casually dismissed by an Olympian JCO. Howard ridicules the presumptuous “man-professor,” academics in general, and any Connecticut resident there who might have a concurrent interest in literature and local sports. Not having been there, I hesitate to call the account simply cranky. But I will call it interesting, on a number of levels.