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.
American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince is a 1978 documentary directed by Martin Scorsese. Steven is a fascinating guy and top-notch raconteur. The whole documentary can be watched on YouTube. A sequel, American Prince, has been made & released exclusively via torrent form, and can be downloaded here.
Stuff curated and created by Harper’s Magazine that caused me to purchase a 2-year subscription this evening: The Yearly Review of 2008, which I found depressing and weirdly calming all at once, all of David Foster Wallace’s essays & stories, especially the presence of Everything Is Green, published 1989, year of my birth, a funny and effective piece titled Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers — c’mon, that’s funny — and the entirety of Sentences, a year-long blog run by Wyatt Mason, fervent literary critic, especially these recent posts in which Wyatt points out that Emerson got distracted too, sans Twitter and email and such, extols the quality of handmade books (score for chapbook makers such as MLP), and walks his audience through/geeks out over the online interactive multi-draft version of Madame Bovary. Go Harper’s, Wyatt, et al.!
The Rumpus Long Interview with Dave Eggers, who I think is a charitable, talented guy. It’s sad that there’s such a pervasive Hate Eggers club out there, existing outside of artistic criticism.
Success, bros ‘?’ : On Twitter, Brandon Scott Gorrell (@lydiadavis) said: ‘my blog is 4th of 38.4 million in google search of “short story contest winner”‘. Graphic designer, writer & dad David Barringer talks about design, the changing model of freelance work, and e-readers being equivalent to fax technology. Robbie from New Jersey one-ups poets everywhere. And Wordnik gives you a lot of information about words; still no O.E.D. references, though.
After two years it became clear to both of us that I had no feeling for harmony. For Schoenberg, harmony was not just coloristic: it was structural. It was the means one used to distinguish one part of a composition from another. Therefore he said I’d never be able to write music. “Why not?” “You’ll come to a wall and won’t be able to get through.” “Then I’ll spend my life knocking my head against that wall.”
This excerpt is from John Cage: An Autobiographical Statement, which is filled to the brim with remarkable and inspirational ideas, as is the conversation between John and Paul Cummings. Topics covered: Zen Buddism, Black Mountain College, John’s chess apprenticeship with Duchamp, mythology, Wittgenstein, Malevich, painting, the nature/structure of music, the ‘dialogue’ between arts and artists, etc.
Sentimental. Happy to be.
You’ve been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.
Ladies and gentlemen, let us make the summer of 2009 David’s.
Appropriate.Jeff Vandermeer, friend to all, shares the journey of his book Finch, from inception to interior layout. I think Jeff is remarkable; he’s prolific AND he spends a lot of time on the internet.
I really look forward to this: The Interview Project, from David Lynch.
A profile of the man who created the much-emulated cliché ‘Hollywood Agent Type’, Irving Lazar.
An interview with William Gass. This one’s so full of good. An excerpt:
As for youthfulness: I value experimentation. In that area I am one of the youngest writers now writing. I smile when I see all these old young people still treating a sentence as if it had been a child of Dick and Jane. A sermon of Donne’s often has more ideas, more energy, certainly more art, than these writer’s entire books. And the meters of Sir Thomas Browne are confounding and should astonish everyone. Age is not a function of time but of mind, the old old old saying goes. Try a novel by the great Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo. He’ll measure how young you are, not the New Yorker. I recently had to do a retrospective piece. It was a horrible experience. Don’t look back; complete immobility may be gaining on you.
More stuff after the jump.
Really disturbing.
So much internet today. I don’t even know how to start. Let me say, though: There’s too much to here for me to distill & tease with quotes from the individual articles, so please have faith and click through to the pieces. It’s all very good. Let’s jump in:
Over at The Millions, the venerable Garth Risk Hallberg has posted the first installment of a three part series talking about the future of literary journalism, i.e. book coverage, titled Part I: R.I.P., NYT? This is a really smart piece of criticism; it defines ‘the problem’/offers solutions/peers into the future. I look forward to the rest. Plus, it includes shoutouts for The Rumpus and The Quarterly Conversation, two of my favorite sites, so, Word.
And here’s an interview with N Frank Daniels at Dogmatika. Really interesting interview. Daniels originally self-published his first novel, and marketed it creatively, and then was signed a two book deal with Harper Perennial. And I have to say: Dogmatika is housing some of the best author interviews I’ve read. Great job, folks.
More after the jump.
