Adam Robinson
http://www.publishinggenius.com
Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he operates Publishing Genius Press. His book of poems, Adam Robison and other poems, will be published by Narrow House Books this year.
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop Smiling
Smiles of the Unstoppable is a 60-page collection of 34 poems, each one about a page to two pages long. It’s a really nicely designed book. Magic Helicopter Press released it on January 1. (Magic Helicopter, of course, is the press run by HTMLGiant’s own super-productive Mike Young.) At first glance the cover image appears to be a kid mid-puke, but if you keep looking you’ll see what it actually is — a kid bobbing for apples. The poems are similar. READ MORE >
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February 16th, 2011 / 2:24 pm
February 16th, 2011 / 2:24 pm
Featherproof, Birds LLC, Flying Object and more
HOLY SHIT! Featherproof does it again. WHAT THE HELL IS STORIGAMI? It’s stories laid out into a foldable fashion — which you print, fold, read and unfold and unread — it’s really neat — the stories change as you turn them into animals. Kathryn Regina, Zach Dodson himself, Daniela Olszewska and I wrote them (mine’s a pig!), with Brad Nagle and Zach doing the hefty design work. This might be old news, though, if you already read the story in NYLON.
Augury Books — a new poetry press in NYC — looks neat — at least judging by the poems they’re reprinting at their site in anticipation of their coming out party — Ben Lerner, Kimiko Hahn, Stacy Szymaszek and more. They don’t have a first title lined up yet — there’s a contest to decide who it’ll be (you can enter for $20 if you aren’t affiliated with the press) — find out more about the contest and their impressive inaugural reading — on Wednesday — at their website.
Also, that gang Birds, LLC has a big ToDo in NYC on Friday. One of the few books I’m looking to pick up at AWP is Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating which they published late last year. This reading — for the Stain of Poetry — features Dan Boehl, Browning herself, Elisa Gabbert, Justin Marks, Emily Pettit, Sampson Starkweather and Chris Tonelli. Fine feathered friends.
What else? I just received an early copy of The Orange Suitcase by Joseph Riippi. It comes out in March, and it’s one to remember.
Last night I watched and loved Winter’s Bone.
And here, via Daniel Nester at WWAATD, is Jessie Carty’s interesting post about double-publishing.
Or would you prefer to watch a video? Here: Michael Filippone video-reviews Ben Spivey’s book, Flowing in the Gossamer Fold.
And to round out this round up with more aviary things: Check out Flying Object, a new independent bookstore. Sure, it’s in Amherst, MA (what isn’t?) — but there’s a lot to explore at their chock-full website.
Dan Magers’s WHITE-COLLAR WORKER: I AM A DESTINY
There’s a new chapbook online at H_NGM_N — Dan Magers’s White-Collar Worker: I Am a Destiny. This one is definitely worth a longer look (and at free, it’s way underpriced). Magers is paying attention to life and giving us not the best sentences to describe it, but the one-liners that best highlight everything else (like, “Someone is having a lot of trouble/in the bathroom.” or “I’m bleeding from the nose. It’s not broken.”) Even if you aren’t — as Magers seems to be — paying attention to arty music and its culture (“The amps are the band. The dudes are the roadies.”) and ramming around with collegiate drunkards (“I have no idea what these kids are talking about./Lacan and baby food.”) you’ll see there’s lots to laugh at and more to find marvelous. I read it quickly and found my reading to be informed by Magers’s early reflection:
Meaning contains a glancing similarity
to what is happening to me.
6 Comments
January 19th, 2011 / 1:18 pm
January 19th, 2011 / 1:18 pm
Literature Party at AWP
(Thanks to Matthew Simmons, whose gif I’m recycling.)
Usually when I try to get my friends to go to a party or a show or something, they ask for details. And usually I’ll just know one vague thing, Uh, it’s this writer-lady who I met once and she seemed pretty cool. Like, I won’t even know what time it starts, except for, You know, rock time.
But I’m damn knowledgeable about Literature Party, the main event at AWP this year, and this time I’m telling all my friends. Here’s the straight dope.
Literature Party is a reading that’s more of a dance, and it’s intended to benefit 826DC. (You’re probably familiar with the 826 organization. It’s that thing that was founded years ago by McSweeney’s as like a literacy program, to help kids outside school and to help teachers in school. A new office opened in DC last year.)
It’s being held at the Black Cat’s main room. Will someone from DC chime in with a Yelp! about the Black Cat? I’ve been there a couple times but never to the main room. It’s big, though. It holds 700 people, and we want to squeeze in every last person.
Blake is going to host a short reading to kick off the event, because this is AWP, after all. It’s going to feature Amelia Gray (whose reading at Vermin on the Mount: Denver last year was The Best Reading of 2010), Tao Lin (who, frankly, is a pretty boring reader but that’s what makes it so rich) and Patrick Somerville (whom Featherproof swears by but I’ve never seen). One of the problems I’ve had with off-site AWP readings is that you can’t hear anything, but the soundsystem at the Black Cat will fix that. If it’s good enough for The Get Up Kids, it’s good enough for very short fiction.
There will also be immersive performances, too. You can have Melissa Broder read your fortune, for instance. You can confess your publishing sins to Richard Nash. Go head to head with Giancarlo DiTrapano in arm wrestling. I’m going to walk around with an electric guitar and a pocket amp so I can hear you, um, shred. And more.
But the best part, I think, is just going to be the hanging out. DJ Lil ‘E, who is amazing, is going to play songs (and she wants to know what to play: make a list in the comments at the Facebook page). We’re just going to chill out with some new and old friends.
There’s more info and a complete list of sponsors at the Literature Party website. Tell your friends.
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Follow up to my review of Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness
After reviewing Awkwardness, I have gone back to explore Adam Kotsko’s group blog, “An und für sich,” and would like to recommend it to readers of htmlgiant. Particularly interesting is their comment policy. You thought we were assholes, take a look at this:
We also have little tolerance for people who whine that the conversation is mainly for insiders — we know it is; we chose for it to be that way on purpose. If you’re not an insider to the various discourses we participate in and you’re still interested in the topic, figure out a way to become more of an insider. If you want advice about that from one of the blog authors, try to ask in a way that shows you’ve done some work on your own.
The whole thing is worth a look, as is their “Open letter to lurkers.” Actually, I don’t think theirs is really a bad perspective, just one that sounds bad when said out loud. Other posts that I like are “Further Symptoms of Insanity,” in which Adam outlines why he might write another book that doesn’t impact his chance at tenure, and this uncomfortably hilarious video called “Conventional Wisdom Parody Technique.”
Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness
Looks like an expert to me
Adam Kotsko, whom I interviewed in June 2009 about his book, Žižek and Theology, has just put out a long essay called Awkwardness. (He’s published two other books since that 2009 interview, too, damn. One is called The Politics of Redemption and the other is a translation of Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language. He makes my 2010 feel lazy.)
Awkwardness is about awkward situations as seen in popular TV and movies and your mama’s. He examines these situations in terms of Heideggerian relationality, similar to the way Kierkegaard looked at irony. Because of its pop-culture conceit it reminds me a bit of those “Simpsons and Philosophy“-type books that I used to buy because I liked the Simpsons or baseball but then would never read because, lo, they were still heady academic essays after all. But Awkwardness doesn’t market itself that way — as it shouldn’t. For one thing, Kotsko doesn’t limit his subject matter; The Office, some girl singing at a bar, and Larry David all come under scrutiny in the course of discussing awkwardness. Even the book’s introduction says it started as a joke, this isn’t philosophy-for-philosophy’s-sake. READ MORE >
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December 27th, 2010 / 7:33 pm
December 27th, 2010 / 7:33 pm
Books for Christmas?
The kid in this video (via Harriet) feels like I do. Unless it’s htmlgiant’s Secret Santa thing, don’t ever give books for Christmas.
The wtf-est book I ever received was Kurt Warner’s bio. What gives, Pop?
Adam Robinson—
Enter the Beecher’s poetry and fiction contest and win $500. Judges are Deb Olin Unferth for fiction and Adam Robinson (me) for poetry.
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