[12/10/09. Email from Justin:] Hi. I’m putting together a year-end post for HTMLGiant, and I’m soliciting very brief lists from a wide variety of authors, editors and lit-people. If you’re reading this, you’re one of them. I want to make this is as quick and painless as possible, so all I’m asking for is the names of your top three new books that came out this year. You can read “top” as “best” if you like, or as “personal favorite,” or any other way you can think of. You are welcome to offer a few lines in explanation or praise of your choices, but you’re by no means obliged to do so. Also, feel free to pass this along to any friends or colleagues whom you think might want to play too. You (or they) should just email me back sometime in the next few days, week at the outside, with your selections, and I’ll compile everything into one big blog post. It’s really that simple. Feel free to plug your own work, but if there is a salient-seeming fact about your relationship to a book (“I loved ____ so much I published it”) please do mention it. Hope to hear from everyone- and thanks, as always, for your time.

Here is an alphabetical list of the respondents: Kate Ankofski, Claudia Ballard, Blake Butler, Jordan Castro, Heather Christle, Joshua Cohen, Brian DeLeeuw, Stephen Elliott, Rachel Fershleiser, Roxane Gay, Keith Gessen, David Haglund, Christopher Higgs, Jen Hyde & Zachary Sussman (writing together), Steven Karl, Ellen Kennedy, Catherine Lacey, Tao Lin, Christian Lorentzen, Fiona Maazel, Amy McDaniel, Charles McNair, Tony Perez, Michael Schaub, Jeremy Schmall, Ronnie Scott, Matthew Simmons, Zak Smith, Mathias Svalina, Eva Talmadge, Justin Taylor, Drew Toal, Deb Olin Unferth, Mike Young.

Their lists are presented in the same order as their names appear above, and each respondent has a brief bio-tag (not even a note, really) which indicates that person’s most recent publication and/or most relevant-seeming credential. These were written by me, not them. Also, there is no standard formatting. Everything was copy-pasted and some links have been lost. The rule is: if it piques your interest, Google it. Did you need me to tell you that? Anyway, a million thanks to everyone who participated. The list of lists–and all the fun–begins after the jump.

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Contributors Mike Young, Chelsea Martin, and myself, along with ‘associate’ Brandon Scott Gorrell will be reading at some places in the Bay Area. This is what is known in the internet world as “irl” (in real life). If you’re around, please come and say hello, but be nice, we are not ready for irl altercations. Mike is coming from Massachusetts [follow his tour]; Brandon is coming down from Seattle [follow his tour]; Chelsea and I live in the area.

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The Brandon Book Crisis (Muumuu House, 2009) by Brandon Scott Gorrell and Tao Lin

A paperback “thriller” about book design published May 25, 2009 in a limited edition of 150 numbered copies. 152 pages, 5.5″ x 7″, © Creative Commons, No Rights Reserved. Features 140+ pages of unedited Gmail chats, text messages, voicemails, and emails between Brandon Scott Gorrell, Tao Lin, and others.

The Brandon Book Crisis is, put simply, a book about the making of a book, which is not an entirely new postmodern conceit, if one thinks about the self-referential Pale Fire (Nabokov), Coming Soon! (John Barthes), or Lunar Park (Bret Easton Ellis), to name a few. ’Edited,’ or rather, compiled by Brandon Scott Gorrell and Tao Lin, it consists of gmail chats (already aestheticized by Muumuu House), emails, and the occasional frantic text concerning the printing of Brandon Scott Gorrell’s During my nervous breakdown I want to have a biographer present – specifically, its fonts, colors, and unworkable files.

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This is just a friendly reminder that tomorrow night is LitCrawl NYC, masterminded by Opium master-chef Todd Zuniga, and sponsored by Harper Perennial and LitQuake (the SFCA literary festival, gone bicoastal). The promotional bookmarks they gave me promise 40 authors giving 11 readings over the course of 2 hours, to be followed by 1 afterparty. Phase 1 begins at 7 Pm and is the East Village Phase. My top picks for this round are either Muumuu House at Botanica (readers are Zachary German, Brandon Scott Gorrell and Abigail Lloyd) or Harper Perennial’s “Silk Ties vs. Black Eyes” at the KGB, where my man Tony O’Neill will be teaming up with Simon van Booy for a nnight of “sartorial and pharmacological trivia.” Sure, why not? Phase 2 is the Lower East Side Phase, and begins at 8 PM. (The idea is you bolt from one thing to the next, bar-crawl style.) This time there’s a clear favorite choice. Is it Opium’s trademark OpiumLive show at Happy Ending? No. Is it the Gigantic magazine microeading at Home Sweet Home, featuring Ben Blum, Shane Jones, Tao Lin, and more? Almost…but no. I’m going to have to go ahead and nominate the New York Tyrant reading at Fontana’s, featuring Robert Lopez and…who is that other guy? Oh yeah! It’s me. Gian (aka Mr. Tyrant) tells me they’ve got it set up so Lopez and I will be on a balcony, reading down to/at/on the crowd, like a true tyrant addressing his loyal subjects, possibly while deciding how many of them to slaughter. Does fun get funner than this? Only at the afterparty, which is ALSO at Fontana’s, so if you come to the NyTy reading you get the double bonus of already being where the blow-out’s at. To see the full schedule, including complete list of readers and directions to all the bars, click here.

[NOTE: The launch party for SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS is at 7 p.m. tonight at Cafe Orwell in Brooklyn. - JT]

My Dog is a Little Obese 

 

put the clif bar in your pocket from a florida gas station and walk away

 put the entire box of clif bars from a duane reade in penn station in your bag and walk away  

 put two clif bars from price chopper into your pocket and walk away

 this is CVS, there are no clif bars here

 buy 4 clif bars from albertson’s and feel bad

 there is 50mg of caffeine in your clif bar

 cut the clif bar in half with scissors and eat one half and put the other half in a bowl

 hide the scissors in the closet

 there isn’t any caffeine in the lemon poppyseed clif bar

 put organic green tea extract on your tongue and put your tongue in my mouth

 there is 50mg of caffeine in my brain  

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

Green Toothbrush 

 

the train leaves in 50 minutes

two people having sex to a lonely and frustrated person singing “I’ll probably never see your face again”

two people taking turns standing under the water in a shower

the hair is black and smells like lemons

two people using one green toothbrush

the train leaves in 20 minutes

one person standing, ironing a red dress

the train is leaving in 15 minutes

the slip is too long and sticking out of the red dress

the boots are loud and slow

two people on a train taking turns laying down on one  person’s lap

the hair looks more brown than red when short

yelling “soccer” in secaucus station

waiting for the new york train

the new york train arrives in 3 minutes

two people buying two large organic coffees

caffeine making four eyes bigger and two brains faster

one person feeding a lemon to one pigeon

one pigeon walking away uninterested

two people sitting on a subway train with two coffees   floating above

two people lying very close on a one-person mattress

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

I Like Every Time We Have Sex 

“I want to have sex with you.” 

“Thank you. I want to have sex with you also.” 

“Really?” 

“Yes.” 

“When I say I want to have sex with you I mean really.” 

“So do I.” 

“I mean really, I don’t just say that as a feeling. Do you understand? Did you really mean that you wanted to have sex with me when we were waiting on line at the movie theater before or did you just mean that as a feeling?” 

“I don’t know. I’m sorry” 

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this person from muumuu house emailed me today and asked to be interviewed. her name is audrey allendale. here are the answers she gave to my questions:

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Concurrently with Justin’s exacting coverage of Ellen Kennedy’s ’sometimes my heart pushes my ribs’, I recently received an extra copy of Brandon Scott Gorrell’s soon forthcoming Muumuu House release, ‘during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present’ by responding to a call on the Muumuu House twitter that anyone who could find a typo on Brandon’s cover would get a free copy.

I had already bought Brandon’s book, being excited about MH as an entity, and liking Brandon’s words, and so am giving away that extra copy here. Tao has agreed to match that copy also with a copy of Ellen’s book, so the winner of this contest will receive both release from MH in one existentially stare-laden weird animal compendium.

this guy looks remotely like brandon but less with it

The contest is simple: Find as many typos in Brandon’s blog as you can. Copy and paste them here into a comment, post.

Whoever finds the most typos wins both books.

If you have yet to discover some of Brandon’s words, please observe nervous assface, which contains this excellent telephone conversation scene:

Lydia Davis answers her cell phone. “Bye,” Richard Yates says. “What do you mean?” Lydia Davis says. “What do you mean?” Richard Yates says. Lydia Davis feels confused. “What do you mean?” Lydia Davis says. “I’m going to bed,” Richard Yates says. “I love you,” Lydia Davis whispers. “Thanks,” Richard Yates says. “You’re welcome,” Lydia Davis says. “Are you even interested in what I’m doing at all?” Richard Yates says. “I’m interested,” Lydia Davis says. She pulls her blankets above her mouth. “What are you doing?” she whispers. “I don’t want to be on this earth any more,” Richard Yates says. “I wish there were many earths, and that I had a choice between them,” Lydia Davis says. “I think I would be happier if there were many earths,” she says. There is silence for fifteen seconds. “Let’s destroy the earth,” Lydia Davis says. “Everything sucks,” Richard Yates says. “Are you going to kill yourself?” Lydia Davis says. “You are such a piece of shit,” Richard Yates says. Lydia Davis moves into the closet, crouches, and tries to cover herself with the dirty clothes in there.

Typos. Bring me BSG moody typos. Moody bitchez, let’s get ‘em. Contest will end Saturday morning.

Orange

I wish my life consisted only of
riding my bike with you
down a giant hill that never stopped
while listening to music
with no one else around
in the middle of nothing,
except a few shiny and relaxing lights above in the sky
like stars but a little brighter
and more orange

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

Brighter and Clearer 

 

After I have an orgasm my body feels like a sombrero-shaped galaxy slowly expanding in the eyepiece of a 4th grader’s telescope 

After I watch a family of lions tear apart the body of a large deer on the Discovery Channel I feel a calming sense of inferiority 

After I watch a horror movie I can’t go to the bathroom without you holding my hand while I pee  

After I take my vegan dietary supplement my piss is brighter and clearer 

After I kiss your eyelids my lungs squeeze out through my ribs, then through my belly button and slowly fly to your face and push very lightly on your cheeks 

After I forget something I said I would remember my brain becomes a roll of vegetable futomaki that an obese chinchilla is trying to eat all in one bite 

After I make you cry one of my organs melts into a runny paste that trickles down the inside of my body and collects at the bottom of my feet 

After I make you feel indifferent towards me my heart turns into a small desert hamster running very quickly on an exercise wheel and then tripping and then spinning around in distress until the wheel stops and the hamster can get up and try running again, but in a more conscious and concerned way 

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

Florida

i had a dream last night about your parents and you

in your house in florida

your parents were dancing in the garage

and your mom was singing

and then the radio stopped for no reason

and she screamed ‘no’

and then walked away

your dad was pissed

then you went into your room and your computer had this program that you could make animations with

and you made like 5 videos of your dad

changing from a happy dad

to a pissed dad

then i woke up

your parents were dancing so hard

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Aside from the Keyhole bidding war ($405 at the time of this post) that has broken out recently, there are other insane contests around the internet that I wanted to link to.

First, I present to you a number of spambot contests running over at PH Madore’s blog and at Blake Butler’s blog. These two contests involve spreading word of the contest in as many other places as possible and then commenting in the respective blogs comment sections to link to where entrants have spread word of the contests. Jason Jordan is another blogger in the habit of running these sorts of contests over at his blog, which require entrants to comment on the post as much as possible in order to win free stuff, like issues of Ninth Letter and Annalemma. So keep an eye on him.

Tim Jones-Yelvington, frequent HTMLGIANT reader, is running a contest at his blog that asks entrants to describe in <1,000 words what their dinner with Lydia Davis might be like. Winner of the “My Dinner with Lydia Davis” contest will receive a one-year subscription to the lit journal of their choice. Wasn’t Lydia Davis married to Paul Auster at some point?

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not ryan call

I received today in the mail a ‘care’ package from Muumuu House and in that package were several books: you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin and Distortions by Ann Beattie and three copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Thank you, Muumuu House, for the ‘care’ package.

And last night a friend and I found a bar in Houston that has ping-pong tables, and we played ping-pong for three or four hours, and I defeated him twice. He did not defeat me. The rest of the time we just hit the ball back and forth and impressed ourselves with our amazing skills. I think I am very good at ping-pong. I think it is the one thing I’m allowed to be good at, maybe. That and washing dishes. I think there is something very satisfying about hitting a ping-pong ball just so, having it do exactly what you want it to do.

To celebrate our finding this bar with ping-pong tables, I would like to offer two copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy, which, sadly, has no poems/stories in it about ping-pong.

Please post your poems/stories about ping-pong in the comments section to be eligible for a copy of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Be sure to include a real email address in the field where it asks for an email address, so I can email you if your poem/story wins. If you are shy, you may also email a poem/story about ping-pong to htmlgiant [at] gmail [dot] com, but if I select your poem/story, then I will post it for everyone to see. This contest is open until 2:00pm CST, Saturday the 7th.

Good work, Muumuu House and Ellen Kennedy, on your first book. I enjoyed reading it.

UPDATE: Winners of the two Muumuu House books are Miles and Darby Larson. Miles and Darby please email your mailing addresses to HTMLGIANT so I can send you your prize.

Thank you to everyone who emailed and posted ping-pong stories/poems.

This post simply brings to your attention things worthy of attention, with extremely light commentary from me.

• Ellen Kennedy’s new book Sometimes my heart pushes my ribs is available from Muumuu house. This is probably widely known, but I wanted to officially note it here. Ellen Kennedy feels like a Dorothy Parker who doesn’t have enough energy to rhyme.
• Chelsea Martin’s new book Everything was fine until whatever will be released March 2009 by Future Tense Books. Watch her read this piece. The ingrown logic and breath-taking/sigh-inducing excess of each subsequent line reminds me of Tao Lin’s ‘the next night we ate whale,’ except each line is different.
• The prolific J.A. Tyler redesigned Mud Luscious archives and ML Press, and his entire site. He would scare me if he wasn’t so nice. His obscene publication list is prone to make one feel like a slacker.
• Juked No. 6 is out. Check out the contents and order. Juked is one of the oldest literary websites out there. It makes me feel good that they are so consistent and devoted.
• Robot Melon Issue Seven is live, including J.A. Tyler, Crispin Best, yours truly [gag], Ryan Manning’s ode to Sam Pink, and one of my personal favorite online writers, Krammer Abrahams. I really like the ‘head trauma at night in the woods’ design.

So those are my updates. I could not find a picture that embodied this post. [*UPDATE: Ryan Manning sent me a picture to post for this post. The 4 colors do not match the 5 updates. He was no doubt driven conceptually.] Thank you for supporting online literature.

Brandon Scott Gorell has a blog.  He wrote a book of poems.  He also wrote a novella, called MY HAIR WILL DEFEAT YOU.  I explained the rest with the title of this post.  Here is an interview I conducted with Brandon Scott Gorrell, who, as will be disclosed shortly, is a piece of shit.

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The image is facetious, but I think we – you and me and everyone we don’t know – are onto something. The internet’s constraints and agilities are being used in wonderful and inventive ways. I’ve noticed writers and editors either reappropriating online aesthetics or its practical functions. Here are three examples that kind of show a spirit to this point:

I. Mark Baumer’s everydayyeah will post a 365 word story this year, running one word at a time. He chose Jesse Ball, who just published The Way Through Doors. [Blake Butler’s review forthcoming in The Believer, April.] One simply could not ‘distribute’ or publish in this form without the easy accessibility of the internet, made more so with the advent of RSS feeds and Google reader. Baumer seems obsessed with finding beauty in the redundancies of every day. True, it will take a devoted fan to check in every day, but let’s compromise: how about every week? We might even learn something about Ball’s structure.

II. Jillian Clark’s brilliant poem (haiku?) untitled under her “so i go in alone” blog post, wherein the entire poem is comprised of wikipedia picture captions.

an okapi cleaning its muzzle with its tongue
an okapi at bristol zoo cleans itself
okapi at chester zoo
an okapi reaches for some leaves

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Tao Lin offered me $2 to review an ‘all purpose promotional’ video which would be uploaded in 1-3 days, then said ‘just kidding.’ I was moved by the initial spirit behind the request and have done so (though I am reviewing the ‘wrong’ one. I will try to review the correct one too.) Please read this before viewing the movie. It will make you more excited for the movie, I hope. [I just spent five minutes trying to embed the source-code but it didn't work, so what follows this review is a mere link.]

REVIEW: This review will not have a point, because I don’t think the ‘all purpose promotional’ video had a point, other than being an ‘all purpose promotional’ video. I will simply describe what I saw in the order of when I saw it, with light commentary. Also, I only watched the video once, taking quick notes, so I may be wrong at points. The ‘narrative’ might not make sense due to choppy avante garde editing. READ MORE >

The online literature world can be broken down into two groups: the ‘Bookish’ and the ‘Sophisticated.’ These groups convey their partisanship with fonts. The font world is broken down into either serif (Times New Roman, Garamond, Georgia) or sans-serif (Helvitica, Veranda, Arial). Of course, there are overlaps, but I’m talking about ethos here baby, shit. From editorial discretion to readership disposition, there is no denying font type. Below is an in depth analysis on the demographics of font-people.

I. BOOKISH

‘Bookish’ people have a lot of books on their shelves and smell like libraries. They read a lot, often dense and abstruse stuff that ‘normal Walmart people’ won’t understand. When I list serif-populated websites, you will know exactly what I’m talking about: McSweeney’s, elimae, eyeshot, Prick of the Spindle, pequin, etc. See what I mean? Now can’t you just imagine a bunch of people wearing elbow patches w/ thick-ass glasses in Cambridge reading this stuff? They are very attached to the printed word — with those lyrical cursive-esque ‘thingies.’ These people are likely to drink herbal tea in the afternoon and cry occasionally. You will find an unread copy of Mason & Dixon on their shelf. They are often pale, white, and pudgy. They have uninspired, or even ‘bad’ sex because they are always thinking about grammar.

II. SOPHISTICATED

There’s this documentary “Helvetica” which I found really annoying. It was all these Europeans who ‘went off’ on how they changed the world with that font.  Helvetica (or Microsoft’s bastardized version Arial) is used everywhere (picture the Target or JC Penney logo). There’s this idea that sans-serif fonts are more modern and ‘with the times.’ Minimalism, from which sans-serif was derived, attracts cynical people. (None of the propagators were breast-fed.) Here are examples: Muumuu House, HTMLGIANT, No Posit, (most of) Bear Parade, Robot Melon, My Name is Mud, etc. See? Now can’t you just imagine a bunch of people sitting on $2000 design chairs with their German techno in the background eating freakin’ carpaccio off of square plates? These people do not believe in God.

Conclusion: The only non-annoying font-type is braille. : : . . : .

See what I mean?

For future reference, and because it’s recently come up, if you are wanting in the worst way to get linked on HTML Giant (man, I don’t blame you, it’s a firestorm in here), it’s really pretty simple. In fact it’s so simple, there are just two steps. Here are those two steps:

PRIMER STEP ONE: (For primer step one, I am going to defer to the guidelines for submission at Muumuu House Press, which I think are absolutely brilliant, and probably the most honest thing I’ve seen a publisher write about the way they select texts:

To submit to Muumuu House find a person who has been published by or is associated with Muumuu House and read their blog. If you like their blog make a comment in their comments section in a sincere and natural manner, expressing your feelings. Eventually someone associated with Muumuu House will probably read your comment and click your name and find your blog. If that person likes your blog, to a certain degree, then they will probably tell other people in emails or in real life and then at some point you will probably be emailed, not necessarily about Muumuu House, but maybe about Muumuu House. I think this is more natural. It supports a ‘there is no good or bad in art’ mentality, is probably faster and more efficient than emailing submissions and having people read them and respond to them, and I think it decreases loneliness, boredom, and despair more effectively than with ‘normal’ submissions, based on my experiences with the internet, I believe. Muumuu House is edited by Tao Lin.

PRIMER STEP TWO: Do something good.

That’s it. Those can occur in any order. They can occur exclusively of one another. They are also dependent on me forgetting everything else already me like the fact that I really want to go run a few miles right now at 11:25 PM, which I will do right after I finish this, forgetting that and other bullshit, and thinking about these things that happen, which can happen at any instant, and then I will click the buttons and copy and past the address and you will appear like magic in the brown letters on the foam green backdrop (I am suddenly doubting my recall of our color scheme) and people maybe will see your name there and maybe sometime click on you even though if they are here and they are looking at the ‘other places’ section will likely have already heard of you because the people who tend to read shit here tend to give a crap about books and have probably already over the course of however long they’ve intermingled that caring about books with the internet somehow stumbled on those places, rendering our links section and any links section just another thing that is a thing is probably not worth mentioning most of the time, like old baby blankets and tennis socks. You might notice I haven’t added a link to the journal I’ve been editing for more than 5 years. That’s just how much it doesn’t matter. And anyhow, more often, things that get linked here that ‘we’ give ‘a shit’ (more Muumuu House props, I guess) about are linked in the blog body because this is a blog and that’s what the blog is for and that’s what happens. I am still typing.

The main way not to get linked is to blind query the HTML Giant email inbox because (a) I don’t know that anyone checks it regularly except for Secret Santa things recently, I know I have looked twice, again it is a ‘token’ (b) I like to find things and remember things rather than being told, I have a mother already and (c) refer to PRIMER STEPS 1 and 2.

The for certain for sure super way not to get linked, if you did go ahead and send one of those ‘link me dear god link me please!’ emails, is not to get your tits in an uproar when 6 days later you haven’t gotten an answer back (current flood of other inbox Santa happies notwithstanding), and then come publicly bitching about how you’ve published several of our writers so why not why not why? I’ll admit I’ve added two links to the links as a result of the editor emailing, but only because I did like those places, and they did not call out about who/what/when/where was published, and let me pick up the email on my own and think, oh, yeah, that’s cool, I can do that, I want to do that. Done.

I like a lot of things. I also like to be a stick in the mud and look at my own ass. It gets me off.