Ken Baumann

http://kenbaumann.com

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.

Stuff I Loved in 2011

That’s the feeling I look for, right? In whatever I’m eating, be it real food, or entertainment, art, people. The major event. A safe, manageable portion of the inner land or map blown away, torn out and away, dissolved or smoked. I only know a couple people who really seek that, or when they say they want that destruction it’s a good lie, and maybe they’ve said it enough so it’s shared and indistinguishable from truth. Regardless, it’s a common myth, a familiar dragon to chase, that of the Art That Changes For Good. I rarely recognize the mountain exploding in realtime, while reading something or watching a movie, it’s felt live that way maybe four times in my adultish life. Mostly it’s just feeling the echo of the boom a time later. Still, standing mountains aren’t terrible, and are often really nice. But sometimes you get lucky (pictured, pictured). Here’s what my year looked like:

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I Like __ A Lot / 42 Comments
December 18th, 2011 / 10:55 pm

I almost got to publish TREASURE ISLAND!!! by Sara Levine, but Europa Editions/Tonga Books sent their acceptance letter A DAY AFTER I sent mine. Alice Sebold selected it personally. Sara’s great, though, and her book is fucking hilarious. A Confederacy of Dunces hilarious & beyond. Go get it.

ToBS R1: no-taste design aesthetic online magazine vs. facebook updates of what you ate / listened to

[Matchup #13 in Tournament of Bookshit]

In the Really Fucking Ugly corner, weighing in at less than a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a pound, is the entire coded structure of happydogmomlitjournal.blogspot.com. Happy Dog Mom Lit Journal is a newcomer on the scene, but has recently secured training with the Google AdSense and AdWords programs, showing off a stiff upper right corner text ad box that flits out ads for Moleskine journals and Tin House magazine subscriptions. Its ability to fly almost completely under the radar––to not have a single pair of eyes look at it, at all, for years, save the eyes of its own mother and master and pen-name bedecked story feeder, among the occasional algorithmic complimentary link bait––is truly amazing. It’s a stunning example of incompetence, laziness, a journey retarded before it’s even begun, and a complete lack of aesthetic sense beyond the named, repuked text-based emotional “landscapes” that can cohere, almost accidentally, under forty thousand clicks or more, here called curation. READ MORE >

Contests / 39 Comments
December 5th, 2011 / 11:43 am

if there’s anything you need to know about “contemporary indie lit” it’s that all you need to do to get a book published is write one  – Impossible Mike

What authors or books do you love that most people hate or have never heard of?

Let’s give away NOTHING, by Blake Butler. Three copies, courtesy of me/Sator Press. Comment with your email address to enter. Winners picked soonish. If you want: talk nightmares.