I'm the author of the novels Solip, Say, Cut, Map, The Country, and The City. I've also written the nonfiction books EarthBound and Eat the Flowers. I'm currently publishing my novel A Task via Kickstarter in order to have an hourlong conversation with each of its first thousand readers. For a decade I published books through Sator Press, and for a decade I acted in film and television; now I help students at St. John's College. More info: kenbaumann.com.
1. If you are interested in the relationship between photographic images and reality, Abraham Zapruder has a conundrum for you. –Errol Morris’s twitter feed
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others. –The Dunning-Kruger Effect
3. Portraits of those who sit across from Marina Abramovic during The Artist Is Present.
4. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. –a profile of Jure Robic, ultra-endurance athlete
5. They’ve watched so many times, full of their clear juice, hanging from small striped boxes, gushing like ants, picking at the hands of unsubtle blind people, nibbling right up to the police hem. –Atonement Century Machinery (Frivolous Ridership) by Fortunato Salazar
6. The photographs of Rodney Alcala, the Dating Game killer.
Zak Smith/Sabbath plays D&D with friends. He makes a good DM.
See the writer, trying to write himself out of a box, into a larger box.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50-d_J0hKz0
This video held me rapt for the 1 1/2 hour stretch. Delanda is a great speaker, and what he says about environmental & intensive partnerships in art is really fascinating to me.
Immerse yourself in the energetic, innovative and potentially illegal world of mash-up media with RiP: A remix manifesto. Let web activist Brett Gaylor and musician Greg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, serve as your digital tour guides on a probing investigation into how culture builds upon culture in the information age.
Riley Michael Parker, the genius behind some hyper-sex and gruesome chapbooks from MLP and Future Tense, is making a film with Carolyn Main, and it needs our help/$. Described as ‘an exploitation style film like the 1970’s John Waters movies’, this is sure to be guh & wonderful. More info, featuring a teasing introductory video that sees both of the above bodies dancing around in drag, can be found here. Go give some! I did!
Okla Elliot: What should young writers today study or do in order to improve their craft?
Christopher Higgs: Become intellectually polyamorous, cultivate an insatiable curiosity for knowledge and experience in as many different guises as you possibly can, question everything, always challenge, learn that failure and rejection are positive things, subscribe to at least three non-literary magazines in three completely different fields (for me, right now, it’s National Geographic, Juxtapose, and Wine Enthusiast – last year it was Seed, Esquire, and Art in America), forget politics: it has nothing to do with you and any time or energy you invest in it is wasted time and energy you could be using productively to learn and experience and create, do not choose sides, do not agree or disagree, embrace contradiction, watch cinema from as many different countries and time periods as you possibly can, seek out unclassifiable music, spend time in unfamiliar locations, expose yourself to new activities, go to the opera, go to the ballet, go to the planetarium, travel a lot, observe as much as you can, pay attention to the way people talk and the way people listen, eat strange food, watch at least one sporting event but instead of thinking about it as entertainment think about it as narrative, ABR = Always Be Researching, carry a notebook and pen at all times, remember it is more important to ask questions than give or receive answers, seek to open up and never close down, seek to seek, do not seek to find, fall in love with language, think obsessively about language, about words, about sentences, about paragraphs, about the sound of words, the weight of words, the shape of words, the look of words, the feel of words, the placement of words, and most importantly be your biggest advocate, think of yourself as a genius, think of yourself as an artist, think of yourself as a creator, do not despair, do not listen to criticism, do not believe naysayers, they are wrong, you are right, they are death and you are life, they destroy and you create, the world needs what you have to say.
