http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
I often think about the various ways in which the small press world differs from the big press world in terms of company practices and choices and how the former could potentially benefit from borrowing some ideas from the latter.
For example, back in the summer of ’09 I asked the question “How come indie publishers don’t do audio books?” This led me to imagine one-upping big presses by suggesting that small presses produce audio commentary for books, like having a writer walk through their book and talk about each section as though it were director commentary on a dvd.
For the most part, neither of those practices have really materialized in the small press world, as far as I know. Although I didn’t do the audio commentary thing, I thought making an audiobook sounded like such a good idea that when the time came last year I made one for my novel, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, which turned out pretty cool. (You can sample it here, and you can get it here for whatever price you want to pay — just scroll down when you get there.) Thankfully, Ken Baumann, the visionary behind Sator Press, who published my book, is such a fantastically forward-thinking publisher that he supported and nurtured the idea — making Sator Press the first small press (that I know of) to offer a complete audiobook version of one of their titles. Full disclosure, my audiobook has yet to garner much critical appreciation or even very much public commentary at all — which is probably to be expected, at least in part because it’s such an anomaly — but in fact I have received emails and gchats and even a few pieces of snail mail from people saying how much they dug it, leading me to believe that there is potential interest to be found in this untapped market.
Which brings me to what I propose could be another untapped market for the indie/small/micro press……something called “Transmedia Storytelling.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ty6UCcixlQ&feature=related
[Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” read by David Henry Sterry]
Deleuze discusses Artaud’s dislike of Carroll here in The Logic of Sense
This is how I would define a feminine textual body: as a female libidinal economy, a regime, energies, a system of spending not necessarily carved out by culture. A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read. For we’ve learned to read books that basically pose the word “end.” But this one doesn’t finish, a feminine text goes on and on and at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues and for the reader this means being thrust into the voice. These are texts that work on the beginning but not on the origin. The origin is a masculine myth: I always want to know where I come from. The question “Where do children come from?” is basically a masculine, much more than feminine, question. The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus in order to close with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once, that makes a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once starts twenty times, thirty times, over.
–from “Castration or Decapitation?” trans. by Annette Kiihn, included in French Feminism Reader (pg. 287)
In case you missed any of them, below you’ll find links to each of the 10 writers who participated in the first edition of my series of interviews aimed at expanding our understanding of experimental literature. We generated a heap of conversation and interest, not only here but all over the web: from Ron Silliman to The New Yorker and elsewhere. Due to the overwhelmingly positive feedback from this series, I have decided to keep it going. I’m currently in the process of creating the questions for the second round of the series, which I’ve decided to formulate by using the answers given by the writers from the first series. This way, hopefully, it’ll feel like an ongoing conversation. You can expect the next edition to appear in the month of May, and to include ten new writers of experimental literature. My thanks to everybody for participating. This has been a really great experience. I’m looking forward to presenting the next edition!
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the memoir The Chronology of Water, officially released TODAY! from Hawthorne Books. Order from Amazon.com, Powell’s City of Books, or join the Rumpus book club.
If you find yourself in or around Buffalo, NY this Friday, check out the day-long symposium dedicated to Mayer’s work…featuring CA Conrad, Dorothea Lasky, and many other superstars, including my wife, Caitlin Newcomer:
Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By, a collection of short innovative fictions (FC2) and Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, a nonfiction/scholarly book (St. Martins). Chasin’s creative work has appeared in print in Unsaid, Hotel Amerika, Post Road, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and Chain, and online in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, Diagram, and Big Other, among other places. Relevant bibliography for this piece includes inclusion in Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary XXperimental Prose by Women Writers, edited by Nava Renek. Chasin has a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College. She teaches at Lang College, The New School, and currently serves as Co-chair of the Literary Studies Department there.
The &Now Festival is a biennial festival, celebration, and conference that explores intersections between creative and critical praxis, examines innovative and experimental acts of writing, and advances a serious inquiry into theories of language and consciousness. The 2011 &Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever! will be held October 13-15, 2011 at University of California, San Diego, a research institution internationally renowned for imaginative experimentation in the arts, humanities, and sciences.
ALSO
Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize
Each spring, Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival, sponsors emerging writers under forty years old—with no major book publication—to spend two months in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan.
