Visceral Readings: The Sluts
I’ve already read a lot this year, maybe even more than most other years. Though lately, in the past few weeks, I’ve found my attention kind of skewed up, which I guess is part of the pattern of reading: it comes and goes.
When I get out of the dire want to spend hours on my back looking at sentences, certain moods will come where I can’t get more than a page into something, no matter how strong, and it will take something of really strong aura, a riveter, to get me excited again. Something visceral, that grabs me by the throat and says, Bitch, you are going to read this.
This week, for me, it was Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts. I picked this up randomly, realizing it was I think the only title of DC’s that I hadn’t read for some reason. I brought it home in the rain and, having put down the last 8 or 9 books I’d tried to start in weeks beforehand, picked it open just to get a taste.
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August 4th, 2009 / 4:15 pm
August 4th, 2009 / 4:15 pm
Drew Toal—
Wouldn’t it be awesome if Hank Williams III [Update: Turns out it was junior in the picture. My bust.] turned out to not actually be related to the legendary Hank Williams I and instead turned out to be the illegitimate son of Marge Schott and dog shit? Because I think that would be awesome.
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Justin Taylor—
Wow, this might actually be the absolute nexus of things I don’t care about. Who among you dares gaze into the Borgesian Aleph of nobody-gives-a-shit?
APOCALYPSE WEEK AT SLATE: How is America Going to End?
#140, "Rods from God"
Slate offers up their top 144 US-centric Armageddon scenarios. (I assume that’s one scenario for every thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses admitted to Heaven.) I am especially fond of #69, “Vermont Independence,” because I’ve actually read Thomas H. Naylor‘s bat-shit crazy book, Secession. I also dig #87, “Opt-in Government,” a scenario wherein “government becomes divorced from geography. People who live in the United States can choose to be governed by the laws of Sweden and vice-versa.” And honorable mention to #107, “Climate Wars,” wherein certain countries conduct experiments to try and stop global warming, some of which trigger (or we suspect they trigger) bizarre and possibly disastrous weather, which causes all the nations of the earth to start attacking each other because everyone thinks everyone else made the weather. Please vote for your favorite or suggest your own in the comments section. Also, a big hat tip to my friend Alice Townes, who by the time she sees this post will have forgotten she ever sent me the link.
More Slate-pocalypse:
Josh Levin introduces Apocalypse Week at Slate
The world’s leading futurologists have four main theories about the demise of the US.
“Choose Your Own Apocalypse” interactive feature
PS- some of you might recall that I edited a little book about the apocalypse. Just throwin’ that out there.
Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurdles Down At You” video trailer
Kudos, Electric Literature.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUClJFjFEgk
Gary Coleman teaches me something about writing.
A buddy of mine wrote to say that he had read somewhere that David Hasselhoff credits many of the choices he’s made in life, and much of his own ability to overcome the difficulties he’s face to his very close relationship with God. Included in the choices and overcoming is his decision to be on Knight Rider.
Some of my best friends are theists, so I’m not trying to bag on that sort of thing here. I will, however, suggest that maybe that voice talking to him and telling him to stick the TV show out for another season could’ve been KITT. Not all disembodied voices are the Lord. (“Remember when there was only one set of tire tracks? That’s when I was carrying you, Michael.”)
READ MORE >
Cover to Cover: The Atlantic
Volcanos in the Atlantic (those red dots)- sort of a metaphor for the exciting short stories in The Atlantic!
I fucking hate the Atlantic because of articles like this one linked here and the many other similiar, hyperbolic crap they publish with far too great regularity. I truly think they try to find the most mentally disturbed, prozacked, never-properly -fucked-in-their-entire-liives journalists they can and ask them to write the most insensible social commentary they can muster. Indeed, I rarely read them anymore because it’s bad for my gallbladder. But, I bought their fiction issue that comes out yearly. And I read all of the fiction in it. Here’s a brief discussion of the first four of seven stories: READ MORE >
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August 3rd, 2009 / 6:22 pm
August 3rd, 2009 / 6:22 pm
Literature of the golden gophers
I’ve got Minnesota on my mind. This contest—an ongoing, weekly Minnesota-themed trivia melee and scavenger hunt beginning this October—looks like a lot of fun, and the Twin Cities sound like a pretty awesome and cold place to be. Apparently, one has to actually be in town to take be able to win fabulous prizes (Vikings era Randall Cunningham jersey? Jesse “The Mind” Ventura autograph?), but they are, until August 14, taking submissions for questions which will be the engine for the lit hunt. Email your esoteric questions concerning dissenting opinions from the Warren E. Burger court to twincitieslit@gmail.com. Contest winners will receive a grab bag of books from Coffee House, Graywolf and other sweet presses.
Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press, The Loft Literary Center, and Milkweed Editions are celebrating our anniversaries and Minnesota’s thriving literary community by hosting a grand scavenger hunt: Around the Literary Twin Cities in (Almost) 80 Days. Each week, from mid-October through December 24th, we will be releasing a Minnesota-themed literary trivia question with prizes awarded for correct answers presented at local venues and a grand prize drawing at the end.
Jimmy Chen—
“Real” diary entries of a young farm girl in 1937 told on Twitter. Meet Genevieve Spencer.
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