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.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V-4jbto2C8
Alright. All this Lish talk has me thinking about first sentences: the pleasure derived from them, the importance, the world-containing, etc.
My favorite first sentence is from Blood Meridian, which is weird to me because I’ve tried to read the book three times and have put it down halfway each time, but it is still a powerful book, maybe too powerful for me at the moment. Anyway, its first sentence:
See the child.
That, to me, is awesome; a plain evocation, and commandment, biblical as all hell which is what Cormac does so wonderfully.
And my other favorite opener, from The Stranger:
Maman died today.
Detached, even with the endearing colloquialism. Prescient, full of doom.
Alright, now you go.
Here’s an essay from Intelligent Life magazine entitled ‘When Novelists Sober Up.‘ I think about the influence and appeal of drugs on artists all the time, as regular drug use seems a constant and easy ‘sleep button/off switch,’ a sort of key to a less mentally-marooned living, albeit one that could, obviously, be destructive and potentially fatal… Reading Infinite Jest has me thinking about this more so than I normally would. Anyway, interesting article.
Two more vital links after the jump:
'Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them.'
Now this is how you start a review:
I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote seance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)
Scorch Atlas (destroyed) by Blake Butler from featherproof books on Vimeo.
Master and commander/Brother Butler/Crier of The Good Lit/Partygirlin Eater of Babies/W.I.B. BLAKE BUTLER has announced that his novel in stories, Scorch Atlas, can now be pre-bought before it’s 9/9/09 release date — and for a 33%off, i.e. $10! — from the inimitable Featherproof Books. And not only can they be paid for, but you can secure a limited edition ‘destroyed’ copy, i.e. a book that’s been punished brutally by our beloved friend Blake, & his company. Or, you know, you can just get a plain old regularly clean version of the book too, if that’s what you’re into.
I have been more excited to subsume this set of words than any other set of words in ________.
Buy this book.
Even though I think most ‘canon’ talk is just another popularity contest — I would not include a book in any ‘canon’ unless it has huge cultural impact, and longevity of 500 years or so, and, um, that leaves what? foundational Judeo-Christian texts? other similar religious monomyths? what else? Seriously. — the book-centered site The Second Pass has listed books they would nominate to nix from the Western Canon — wait, just the definition of the word ‘canon’ alone makes me gag a little: since when are writers supposed to respect any sort of institution/law/principle, and can we really say definitively that another artist’s work is ‘authentic’ outside the catharsis the artist achieved in his/her bedroom/prison cell/cabin while they’re creating? I guess the calling-into-question of what makes something ‘authentic’ is another discussion. Maybe it’s only ‘quality’ being talked about, and then doesn’t that just revert back to the culture-boom/500yr thing anyway? Ddddoinkyff.
Anyone have books by Ken Sparling up for sale/loan/gimme? If so, please comment and we’ll work out a $ transaction.