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.
So, uh, what do you do for a living?
Writing about jobs is difficult to do well. I wonder if people think that since their employment is something they aren’t passionate about (“just payin’ the bills”), it’s more acceptable to ramble on about it in an unmediated voice which they might not otherwise write in? Like, when you’re writing about something that everyone automatically understands — devoting half our lives to some company we hate, say — it’s easier to take artistry for granted.
I don’t know what I’m saying but I feel like if I keep saying it, I’ll start to make sense. Writing about writing about jobs is difficult to do well.
Anyway, if you think you got the knack, old boy Josh Maday and Jeff VandeZande are putting together an anthology of the stuff for Bottom Dog Press. “In short, [they] want modern stories about people and their work.” The nice thing is that acceptance pays $50 — so work hard for the money.
And, btw, what’s the greatest work story ever told? Below the fold I’ve listed some good ones. READ MORE >
Uncategorized / 50 Comments
July 8th, 2009 / 10:44 am
July 8th, 2009 / 10:44 am
The MLKNG SCKLS Is Not A Callous Video Game Contest
Today is the last day to submit an entry for Publishing Genius’s contest to win a copy of MLKNG SCKLS, a fake video game, and some drawing by Justin Sirois that I haven’t seen, but I have seen some other drawings he’s done, they’re great.
To win the contest you have to write 50 words about the video game, 6 Days in Fallujah, as if you were writing a blurb for the back of the video game. More info here.
Another long interview (this time with Žižek brain, Adam Kotsko)
Haha, he looks funny
When Adam Kotsko’s book Žižek and Theology was published about a year ago, he was still working on his PhD at Chicago Theological Seminary. It’s an impressive feat and an impressive book. Certainly there are better introductions to Žižek’s thought than Adam’s book, which takes as its starting point the issue of where Žižek aligns with theology — duh — but I still found it to be a valuable crash course. (Does anyone else find it useful to approach a new subject from a specific perspective, and then apply what you know about that perspective to the subject? I risk conflating the two things when I do it this way, but wtf: I’m okay with being wrong.) READ MORE >
The Chapbook Review
We’re chock full of writers, right, and there are more and more presses starting up every day. Hallelujah. Like check out North Punk Press and their new thing, the nicely titled story by Paula Bomer called “An Important Day in the Joyful Life of Marjorie Wallace.” It’s a teaser for a future chapbook, and it’s put together handsomely on blogger and as a downloadable PDF. The story concerns Marjorie, an administrative assistant who runs into an old friend and chastises her for not calling, and then ends up feeling kind of bad but kind of hopeful, or maybe she has sunstroke. Read it, get it.
But anyway, what I was saying is that there are plenty of writers and presses starting up all the time, a bunch of people and publishers I’ve never heard of even. I can’t keep track.
So that’s why I’m really excited about The Chapbook Review, which as founder John Madera puts it, is “a monthly online literary journal focused on the critical examination of the venerable chapbook.” Just as the list of novellas Madera put together is massive (not to mention, holy geez, his gorgeous and flabbergasting review of Light Boxes), so shall be The Chapbook Review. The first issue features a conversation that Pig Babi Blake Butler had with academe Chris Higgs, and then that conversation in reverse. It’s got reviews by Sean Lovelace and Tobias Carroll and Kimberly King Parsons and tons of people about books by Matt Bell, Mike Heppner and Aaron Burch and so much more I’m not saying it right. There’s reviews of Willows Wept books and Sunnyoutside books. I mean, there’s like two reviews of the same book from The Cupboard for crying out loud. I’m as excited as a squirrel on fire about The Chapbook Review, for real, because to go along with the shit ton of writers and editors, now there is more inquiry to legitimate it, lightening the burden some for the precious few outlets (New Pages, Rain Taxi, The Quarterly Conversation) that are taking critical reviews of small press fare as a serious and sole objective.
Uncategorized / 18 Comments
June 6th, 2009 / 2:19 pm
June 6th, 2009 / 2:19 pm
I Like Caketrain a Lot and interviewed them about it
When I say Caketrain never ceases to amaze me, what I mean is that Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed are always amazing me. Even when I’m not doing anything but trying to fall asleep, even when I’m doing tons of stuff like negotiating printer maintenance costs for the Stamford office, I marvel: how do they do everything they do so well? The things they publish in the journal are continually new, smartly readable, and surprising. Their books are fun to hold. Their design is consistently impeccable. And they’re making it happen so affordably that anyone can buy and read them. What a great way to save literature, to not overcharge for it.
So one day, when I couldn’t take my publisher’s envy anymore, I sent them a few questions that first rattled to mind. They responded generously, taking my trivialties and forming from them genuinely interesting subjects. And even better than that, they included pictures and captions and links that fit seemlessly into the HTML Giant archives. Read the interview below the fold. READ MORE >
Whoa!
Hey World, how’s it going? Oh? Great, I’m glad to hear it. Um . . . this is just a little thing, please don’t worry about it, uh . . . but, yeah, it’s spelled W-H-O-A. Everywhere I look lately it’s misspelled and I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s so awfully ugly with the “h” at the end.
No, no. This is more embarrassing for me than it is for you. No seriously, I’m the one who should be sorry. I just, well, I just thought if I was making such a silly blunder I would want someone to tell me. That’s right, World, “Whoa.”
Okay, cool. See you around.
Friday Boobs
In the early nineties Bono said “We thought we were a punk band, for about 2 seconds” (paraphrase) and I’ve hated U2 since. (Actually, I didn’t like them before that either, even though I can be TYPICAL and say Boy was a pretty good record.) I felt alienated; they were suggesting that “yeah, we liked what is important to you, we got it and everything, but we’ve moved on and look at us now. Now we’re cool.”
So it isn’t like that when I say I was a feminist for two seconds. I didn’t get it, and I still want to be one. I wish I was a feminist more than anything. I did a semester in grad school for theology because I think feminist theology is maybe second only to queer theology in terms of, you know, solving all of life’s problems. My tongue is set firmly on the bottom of my mouth here.
But my tenure as a feminist was stalled after reading Luce Irigaray and learning that cutting the umbilical cord gives a child its primary name, namely the navel, a sufficient identifier, READ MORE >
What are the 50 best poems on the web?
The Dzanc Best of the Web is awesome and the Wigleaf thing is awesome and John Madera’s novella list is awesome but does poetry get short-shrift when it comes to these best-of lists? Is there a list for poetry? I can’t remember.
In case there isn’t, put your favorite poems from last year in the comments.
“Glad enough to play a very cliched and overplayed song that you would hate to hear if I wasn’t singing along to it”
- Radio that matters
Daniel Green’s new venture
Who has globes anymore?
Dan Green runs what I consider to be one of the most thoughtful literature blogs. It’s called The Reading Experience. In 2004 he wrote about something I wrote about criticism and dissed me in a really nice way (here’s that). He knows his stuff and writes with great attention about serious, new literature. Now he is starting a journal-ish thing that HTML Giant readers should know about. READ MORE >