Boobs Friday for Internet Literature
Friday. I think Friday is okay? Friday actually kind of sucks for internet land because it’s the beginning of the weekend and during the weekend people aren’t at work all day jacking off on the internet not doing their real job and they are actually out like talking to people and being with real life friends. Fuck all that. The weekend is like my reverse weekend. I have a weekend through the week and the weekend feels like the week.
Internet literature definitely suffers on the weekends, there are less emails, less updates, stop being real people, mmk?
To combat the weekend slump of weekend, HTML Giant is pleased to present some tits.
As a gift to internet literature from our very own Kendra Grant Malone, here are Kendra Grant Malone’s boobs.
This hopefully will be the beginning of what I’d like to think of as Boobs Friday for Internet Literature.
Submit your boobs for future Fridays, get an acceptance to like elimae or Wigleaf via karmic booyah.
Next week is MEAN WEEK
In the face of all our current praising and cataloging of the good, HTML GIANT is proud to announce now that next week in our hands will be known as Mean Week. I mean, yeah, it’s fun to praise a lot of things, but sometimes you should be mean.
So all next week, we’re being mean. We might be mean even if we like you. We might be mean in a rotting hatred of your mother. We might expect you to be mean back.
It can’t be all lambs and roses. Mean Week is real.
Ryan Call, you’re going to have to find a way to be mean.
Sam Pink, let’s fight.
Kissed By…
I road the bus to work this morning, and 1) listened to Disintegration Loops by William Basinski and 2) read a random story from Kissed By by Alexandra Chasin.
The story was called “They Come From Mars” and in one of those all-too-common moments of synchronicity, that story is essentially a disintegrating language loop. It contains only—until its surprise ending—four letter words. (No, not profanity.) There are twelve words a line. The font is Courier, I think, which is a monospaced (fixed width) font, so all the words are the same size.
What begins as an incantatory: They come from Mars they come from Mars…gives way to a discussion of the arrival of visitors from Mars. Chasin abbreviates. “There” and “their” become “ther.” When we speak, we abbreviate without realizing it, and she uses that to her advantage. “Suspect” becomes “spec.” (Unless she means “expect,” but, she uses that ambiguity to her advantage as well.)
The long columns of twelve word, monospaced lines, the paranoia in the prose (they come from Mars, for Heaven’s sake!), the flatering, disintegrating prose loops—it reminds me of Howard Finster a little, outsider art. The text on the bottles of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap.
And, as I said, it dovetailed nicely with the Basinski, a recording of a long, old tape loop repeating and repeating and repeating and slowly falling apart moment by moment in such minimal steps, you miss it.
Blake sent me this book. Thanks, Blake.
Today is J.G. Ballard Day
over at Dennis Cooper’s blog, The Weaklings.
For folks who don’t know, Cooper runs one of the greatest blogs on the net. He organizes his posts into massive, theme-driven “Days” and posts a new one daily, Mon-Sat. Topics range from literature to cinema to art to professional wrestling to gay porn to music to whatever else you can think of. He’s also a big advocate of collaboration and participation, and is always eager to have members of his blog community to guest-curate a Day of their own devising.
A semi-random sampling from the blog archives:
October 8th was David Ohle Day, guest-curated by Jeff
October 2nd was John Ashbery Day
On September 22nd we checked out some male escorts
On September 19th I curated a day of pictures of my friend Maggie
On June 7th we reviewed some of the history of Queer Punk
On May 6th we looked at 10 squats
March 13, 2007: A Basic Layout of David Lynch’s ‘The Air is on Fire’
Peter Markus
Always looking forward to what Peter Markus is doing with his words, I decided to ask the man himself what we can expect from him in the future. A few great things to get everyone pumped:
-A new book of brother stories to be published by Dzanc in 2011.
-A limited edition book from Cinematheque Press called “The Moon is a Fish” that he describes as “a sort of novelty project that will have illustrations, maybe even maps, other odds and ends and assortments—fish bones, fish teeth, fish scales, a broken off piece of the moon, etc” to be published sometime next year, but not definite yet.
-A manuscript of three long stories where “every word is monosyllabic.” One of these will appear in the next issue of Unsaid.
And if all that is too much of a wait, Peter will be on Detroit radio this morning at WDET 101.9FM on the show Detroit Today at 11:00.
fc2 Blog
In the world of blog competitors, fuck, we might have one here now: FC2 is blogging live live. Mostly about their authors and new releases and the like, all of which remain good news in my book. Worth a bookmark? Fo sho.
It also seems a brother to the Now What blog, run by similar company, Lance Olsen and crew.
If someone can convince Gary Lutz to start blogging, I will cry a baby doll that will stand on America.
Please?
Nobel Prize in Literature
I know we are supposed to be talking about ‘indie-lit,’ and that the Nobel Prize in Literature is on the other end of the spectrum, but there is some relation: a new disfranchisement.
The prize was announced today to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (what a name! Where’s your hyphen and accent mark Philip Roth?), who most of us haven’t heard of. From this article in The Independent:
The Nobel literary committee today infuriated the bookies, delighted the bookish and thumbed its nose, again, at the American book industry. The 2008 Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a half-British French novelist and philosopher, who lives in America and champions the “lost” wisdom of non-Western cultures.
The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison fifteen years ago in 1993 (it’s odd, and pleasant that our national representative is a black woman). I don’t want to talk about politics. I just have some questions: is the American psyche becoming more obsolete under a global consciousness? Are we being symbolically punished for our foreign policy transgressions by a globally progressive institution? Or do we just suck? (By the collective ‘we’ I mean Americans, even though I’m Canadian.)
Pynchon and Salinger are burying their food in the woods. DFW is dead. John Updike can’t stop writing about his dick. If American lit has something to say, what is it?
Paperwall is awesome
These dudes over at SKINC make a pretty rad magazine called Paperwall, which you may or may not have come across while internet trolling. I must say the concept of this lil’ mag is awesome. Each issue is one pdf page of literature, and it’s usually just a few writers each time. I have a soft spot for typography and creative design, and Paperwall consistently satisfies my want for simple sexy design aaaaaaaand good literature. Woot. Their new issue features Matt Savoca (<3), John C Goodman, and our own Mr. Shane Jones. You can read each issue in about 10 minutes, and it’ll make your day feel special (Not like retarded special. I mean like special special).
Read issue 11 here.
Uncategorized / 4 Comments
October 9th, 2008 / 3:50 pm
October 9th, 2008 / 3:50 pm
2 Online Journals I like that I never see talked about
There are all kinds of little weird journals tucked around the internet that no one talks about really, I don’t know why some get talked about and some don’t, some get talked about even though they kind of suck and some that do some really interesting stuff don’t get talked about probably because they just like words and don’t care about showing people, that’s good, maybe I shouldn’t show anybody, I am going to anyway.
The first journal I like that I never see talked about is Mustachioed, which features really cool bizarre, hip-ish art and nice and strange little snippets of absurdist-like poems. The current issue has more known people like The Pines and Nate Pritts alongside several other people I’ve never heard of, which is my favorite way to see a journal: a few semi-knowns, and some new(s). I haven’t read much of this new issue yet, it seems more ‘modern’ than previous issues, but in issue three it had Sean Kilpatrick, who I nominate as the king of something good. Really, it is nice to see journals that clearly make consideration to give a chance to make the work look good, no matter what the words are: the design of the site is clean and nice.
The second journal I like that I never see talked about is COUPREMINE. They do really deconstructionist type stuff with weird graphs and found objects, or at least language that feels as such, as well as seeming erasures of weird mechanical texts. The design of the site is appropriately minimalist to match the structure and reflection of texts, like this excerpt from Maurice Oliver’s piece in the current issue:
Then finally, I make a list of the things we won’t need:
-Hula honey in the airplane propeller.
-A stand-in knot of arsenal bondage.
-Any spittish trail that pours out of chance.
-Straw bales from your marooned pelvic purse.
-Any trifle act of a same-sex drought.
It goes on a little further like that, and the whole site is stuffed with this kind of peculiar disconnection, which makes the fact that is buried that much cooler, so tuck this thing in your computer and shhh don’t tell anybody.
Uncategorized / 7 Comments
October 9th, 2008 / 1:53 am
October 9th, 2008 / 1:53 am
Literature Rules
Literature does rule, but I was talking about the rules. Here are some nice websites with implicit publishing parameters, along with examples of my own.
[Example]: The autistic free-style rapper kept on saying ‘word’, like this: Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word.
[Example]: The autistic goth kept on saying ‘the world is a vampire,’ like: the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire.
[Example]: John wrote a sentence. This was the sentence. Then, he google imaged ‘ass’ and encountered two types of photos. The first was people’s buttocks. The second was donkeys. There was no third.
[Example]: Once upon a time, John Cage wrote a story.
[Examples]: extremely abridged versions
Story 1: Gatsby loved, the world hated.
Story 2: Leopold Bloom had a nice day (not exactly).
Story 3: Mrs. Dalloway and menopause.
Story 4: Portnoy complained.
Story 5: Lolita gave good head.
Story 6: Kurtz, he dead.
Story 7: Anna Karenina, she dead.
Story 8: Gay boys on the beach, blowing.
Story 9: RSVP, Godot. Not.
Story 10: Two cities, fucked.
Story 11: K., fucked.
Story 12: Arab on the beach, fucked.
Uncategorized / 8 Comments
October 8th, 2008 / 4:42 pm
October 8th, 2008 / 4:42 pm