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.
Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge)
by Joshua Cohen
66 pages. Tape-bound
$5.00 (Just released — order here!!!)
A man performs the role of the Sun in a bit of modern choregraphy, and a young ballerina ruins a dinner party with one violent sneeze. A painter paints paintings of walls and hires a painter to paint onto a wall. Some lifestories get rejected. Some stalkers get stalked. Here, for you: twelve stories, to be read as they were written—on the bridge, in the tunnel, in the bus, on the train.
Here’s an excerpt:
from Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge)
“WHEN WE STOPPED SAYING WE WERE GOING TO MOVE OUT OF THE CITY”When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had:
nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the train, nothing to talk about to my aunt, nothing to talk about to her parents, nothing to talk about over pizza, nothing to talk about over good but insufferable sushi, nothing to talk about on the corner of Canal Street & Centre, nothing to talk about at jury duty, nothing to talk about in the bathroom at the theater before a movie began. When the bun place closed. The midnight movie theater in Midtown. When there was nothing to do in Midtown. No point to go. When the deli that pastramitized its own meats shut down, too. I really liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable (we had to be). But, speaking just for me, more depressed.
One of my all time favorite writers, Robert Coover, has a new book coming out in about two weeks called Noir. It’s a detective novel written in the second person. Say what you will about writing in the second person, I’m super excited to see what Coover does with this puppy.
You can read an excerpt at Vice.
You can listen to Coover read from the book and answer some questions via Kelly Writers House.
Here’s a blurb from Ben Marcus:
“At age 75, Coover is still a brilliant mythmaker, a potty-mouthed Svengali, and an evil technician of metaphors. He is among our language’s most important inventors.”
Here’s the summary:
You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband’s killer-if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears-if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten’s bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. “The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow” unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers’ tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don’t always get the joke, though most people think what’s happening is pretty funny.
As of late, I’ve been on this Black Metal kick. Mayhem, Burzum, Krallice, Sigh, Cobalt, Liturgy, Wolves in the Throne Room, etc. So a buddy lent me this book called Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind. It’s not very well written, by which I mean the composition isn’t particularly engaging, the organization is less than fluid, the structure is uninspired, and the insights are rarely explored beyond their basic recognition; but, as a primer for the genre, I thought it was pretty good. (Plus, there’s a bunch of crazy pictures depicting Norwegians in corpsepaint.) Before I read it I didn’t know anything about Black Metal, and now I feel like I have a fair understanding of its origin. Plus, I learned a little about Vikings, a little about murder, and a little about Satanism, which are all interesting things to learn a little about.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
The Devil has always treasured music. What better arena to inspire, cultivate, and propagate his will into the affairs of man? Music serves as both balm and excitant, soothing the savage or awakening dormant passions. In spiritual terms music is a magical operation, a vehicle for man to communicate with the gods. Depending on whom the celebrants invoke, this can mean soaring to heaven on the voices of angels or raising beasts from the pits of hell.
Just heard the sad news that Lucille Clifton has died.
wishes for sons
by Lucille Cliftoni wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn’t believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.
we bought 10 copies of Ben Brooks’ Fugue State Press title FENCES & are going to give a free, signed copy of it to the next 10 people who pre-order his forthcoming Mud Luscious Press novel(la) AN ISLAND OF FIFTY. go here to order his book for $12 or here to get Brooks’ title in tandem with Sasha Fletcher’s WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS for $20.
we’ll even keep track for you here:
10 9 8 7 65 4 3 2 1
Mina Loy was a kick ass modern writer/thinker whose historical significance has unfortunately been overshadowed by her male contemporaries — as is the case for many important women avant-garde writers. We hear about Andre Breton and Filippo Marinetti, but rarely do we hear about Beatrice Wood, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, or Mina Loy.
Anyway, the other day I came across this thoughtful examination of one of Loy’s poems (“Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker”: The poet navigates the unknown world” by Jessica Burstein) so I thought I’d share that with you and use the opportunity to boost Loy’s name back into the cultural consciousness.
Here’s the opening of the poem Burstein discusses in her essay:
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopiaTo some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies–from the opening of “Lunar Baedeker“
And here is a quote from Loy’s book called The Lost Lunar Baedeker:
Imagine a tennis champion who became inspired to write poetry, would not his verse be likely to embody the rhythmic transit of skimming balls? Would not his meter depend on his way of life, would it not form itself, without having recourse to traditional, remembered, or excepted forms? This, then, is the secret of the new poetry. It is the direct response of the poet’s mind to the modern world of varieties in which he finds himself. In each one we can discover his particular inheritance of that world’s beauty.
If you’re interested to learn more about her, you can begin here, here, and here.
Over at Salon.com, Laura Miller has a piece called “Never coming to a screen near you: Why promoting books with movie-style trailers is a silly idea.” Here’s a snippet of her argument:
Alas, Web videos are even more numerous than books, and as with books, the vast majority of them go unwatched and uncelebrated. A few manage to command that most mysterious of all magical powers, word of mouth, and become sensations, but that kind of success is as impossible to force as an “Oprah” booking. In the meantime, an author’s energies have been funneled into a project that’s unlikely to yield many results.
Here is an example:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1chqggKw_Ds&feature=player_embedded
Robert Cohen has a new piece worth reading called “Going to the Tigers: Notes on Middle Style” now up at The Believer.
Ultimately, I disagree with Cohen because to my mind he’s implicitly recuperating the old Aristotelian virtues we know so well from Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, in order to illustrate his point about the value of avoiding both excess and deficiency. What seals my disagreement is this statement:
Reading a novel that feels overly finessed, not quite visceral, makes us antsy and peevish. Enough with the light show, we think, enough with the incense, the dry ice, the elaborate riddles and evasions. No wonder people hate novels.
For one thing, I disagree with his use of first person plural. It makes “us” antsy? “We” think? Really? You’re gonna make a claim that you know what reading an overly finessed, not quite visceral novel makes me feel? That’s bonkers. And point of fact, I almost exclusively (and purposefully) read works that strive for light shows, incense, dry ice, elaborate riddles and evasions. I’m being serious. That’s why I attend to literature: for the spectacle.
But before I skin my tongue, I’ll leave it there. Take a gander. Seems like something that might/could spark some conversation.
My apologies to Jereme, who recently commented something along the lines of “htmlgiant is like a teacher’s lounge,” but since I spent the weekend putting together course proposals for next year, I thought I’d share one of the possible reading lists I devised for my “Introduction to American Experimental Fiction” course. You’ll notice that all of the selections are on the shorter side <300 pages. This is crucial, so that I can cover a bunch of different texts. Nothing is set in stone yet, so I would love to hear what you would add or subtract from this list, and why:
Ishmael Reed – Mumbo Jumbo
William S. Burroughs – The Soft Machine
Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School
Carole Maso – Aureole
Jean Toomer – Cane
David Markson – This Is Not A Novel
Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons
Ben Marcus – The Age of Wire and String
*As a bonus, my wife found this cool database of syllabi for American Lit courses from professors at various universities (including a Poetics syllabus from Susan Howe for a course on “Sexuality and Space in 17th – 19th Century American Literature.”
The Norman Mailer Writers Colony is pleased to announce its call for applications for the Second Annual Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fellowships at Provincetown, MA.
The Mailer Fellows have been created to honor Norman Mailer’s contributions to American culture and letters and to nurture future generations of writers. In 2009 seven Fellows spent four weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts where they wrote, discussed their work, and were visited by writers such as Don DeLillo; editors and writers from leading publications such as the New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair.
Fiction and non-fiction writers can apply for a 28-day residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts, near Mailer’s home beginning July 5, 2010. Once again, seven Fellows will be selected. In addition, as many as 66 applicants will be offered scholarships to one week writing workshops in Provincetown during May, June, August and September, 2010. Information about the Fellowships, including an application, can be found at – http://www.nmwcolony.org/curriculumPrograms/overview/.
Applications must be received by March 13, 2009.