Simon Evans’ One Hundred Mix CDs for New York
Simon Evans’ One Hundred Mix CDs for New York (2008) [framed view] is one of my favorite works by one of my favorite artists. He’s English and lives in Germany; spent some time in San Francisco where he was “discovered,” and where I had the privilege of meeting him. (He was working at Peasant Pies where I patronized daily — obsessed and worried over his first show in the back of a bookstore which basically stunned everyone by its brilliance.) His rise to success is an optimistic tale of nice guy with, rather than a foot, genius in the door. The following examples are taken from his more comprehensive blog portfolio (be sure to click and enlarge each pic to see the textured layers).
Jimmy Chen—
Mud Luscious to print first year anthology {MLP: FIRST YEAR} featuring shane jones, brandi wells, nick antosca, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, eugene lim, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, michael martone, and a handful of htmlgiant contributors.
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Jimmy Chen—
Fictionaut is officially launched. Feels like the facebook of lit: everything hyper-linking to another thing, each page view, each comment, each user, each group. You can share it, pdf it, fav it. I don’t mean to sound critical — I mean, we at htmlgiant thrive off the inertia of our comments and the other viral aspects of the web — it’s just that, well, I think we’re getting a little widget crazy. Each wonderful story feels inundated with a viral capacity that distracts me from the story. Sorry to be a drag, and much respect to all the users/contributors, I just feel weird.
Glimmer Train’s Best Start
The more creative editors get, the less writers have to. I’ve noticed a lot of send this type of thing in submission guidelines, which can be effective when applied as a formal constraint, but it seems, with the exponential increase of content everywhere, that we (as writers and editors) grow less and less concerned with writing than we are with creative publishing. Editors, who may be themselves writers, are more and more conceptually proactive, and no longer just “edit” in a subtractive sense, but impose an editorial narrative on the aggregate of work they publish. This can be, and is often exciting, but sometimes just, um.
Of their “Best Start” fiction category: “[…] is different from our others in that the piece should be an engaging and coherent narrative, but it does not need to be a complete story […]”
And you thought flash fiction was the easiest way to write, now you don’t even need to finish a story. They then go on to say, “All pieces should be original fiction and not have appeared in a print publication.” If the piece is unfinished, how the hell would it have appeared elsewhere? Then they say, “No fiction for children, please.”
Jimmy Chen—
Pequin what is going on? Are you okay? You’ve been on hiatus for almost 5 months. We miss your almost-daily stories. We noticed you were not reading new submissions to catch up on the back log, but now you aren’t posting any either (great “random link” code from mainpage, btw). Anyways, we hope everything is okay and that you will come back soon.
In defense of ugly
The Woman in the Dunes
I recently tried to read The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe and couldn’t get past the sexy talk with the woman. I really loved Abe’s description of sand, a significant metaphor in the book, kinda like Sisyphus’s boulder but smaller. It’s really quite amazing, what Abe has to say about sand. I got really excited about it, until the main character meets a woman, which I immediately became pensive about.
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September 22nd, 2009 / 10:23 pm
September 22nd, 2009 / 10:23 pm
ǝsnoɥ uʍop ǝpısdn ןooɔ ʎןןɐǝɹ
˙ʎuɐɯɹǝƃ uı ǝsnoɥ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝɔıu sıɥʇ ʇno ʞɔǝɥɔ (ƃuıoqƃuıoq ɐıʌ)
Jimmy Chen—
The &Now Conference of Innovative Writing is happening October 14 – 17 in Buffalo, New York.