Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
It was also good for starting a campfire.
Suddenly life has become quite full of monoethic ninnies and nannies who address life solely as a problem to be solved.
Hangovers have all the charm of a rattlesnake cracking its jaws as it swallows a toad.
I simply loved the flavor and a tear formed when I poured it out in the sink after gazing at it for several hours.
It’s hard to determine pathology in a society where everything is pathological.
Naturally, there are special occasions.
The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit, thus losing a pleasure that’s been with us forever.
By dawn eager flies had gathered.
The sky is cold/clod in Indiana. I feel low 3-cornered like the sky. I want a funny book. My kidney stones to rattle. I want to blow Pepto Bismol out my nose.
Tell me a funny book. Blue, black, red, anecdotal, satire, wet, dry, corn cob, slapstick, repartee, funny-but-not-ha-ha funny, hyperbolic, galactic, etc.–just give me humor.
Here is one for you: Iceland by Jim Krusoe. It is smart funny, scaffold funny, full of absurd twists. Characters will appear as Main, then dropped into volcanoes and we yawn on. It has funny SCUBA sex (one of the best varieties). It has pacing like 50 pages for an afternoon, whoops 10 years just gassed in a paragraph. One day you repair typewriters. The next you rob gas stations for your drug-addicted lady. Or maybe a parrot. Like that.
You people read loops around my House of Know-How, so please list here funny books:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1I7Vrq0qU4
Thank you, Craig Baldwin.
Here is an interview with Carver biographer Carol Sklenicka at The Economic Times, India’s leading business newspaper. This website is quite the thing, especially for the epileptic. It is cluttered and jangly and tries to sell you every square inch of someone’s soul or something. Just focus on the interview.
Noted: a dip in sales of Carver’s books. Why? Why, person who wrote “…a masterful biography rated by the New York Times as one of the best 10 books of 2009”?
For one thing, he was too much imitated and for another, it is usually more important for younger writers to look at living writers.
The imitation thing is one persistent myth, I’ll say that. Is it really more important for younger writers to look at living writers? I absolutely disagree, and my MFA program disagreed, and I am thankful.
Writer: What do you think about when placing stories or flashes or essays or poems or whatnot in a collection?
Order? Disorder? Intent?
Reader: How do you ingest a collection? Start to finish, left to right, top to bottom—blar!
Reader: A while back I was reading Drift and Swerve by Samuel Ligon and found myself intrigued by Nikki, a reappearing character. So I read all the Nikki stories first, then read the others.
Writer: Is a collection an album? Greatest hits, do you hear a single, does anyone remember the term concept?
Reader: This Richard Russo collection, it had a spectacular story, one, and the others…well.
Seems like you can crag in more tone shifts, more gnashes, poet. Can the prose writer do the same, or do these texts need to have some similarity?
You say hybrid, I say what?
Let’s bale these tendrillic texts, bathtub them, and call everything a novel! So clean!
OK.
Was just wondering. Etc.
I spent whole summers at Neauphle alone except for drink.
I don’t know the medical term for it.
Alcohol was invented to help us bear the void in the universe–the motion of the planets, the imperturbable wheeling through space, their silent indifference to the place of our pain.
I used to work out systems for doing the same as everyone else.
Alcohol’s job is to replace creation.
But alcohol can’t produce anything that lasts. It’s just wind.
We live in a world paralyzed with principles.
I’d forgotten how to walk.
Nor is there any consolation for stopping drinking.
DB 101: When a literary magazine rejects your work, there is rarely, rarely any reason to reply.
While we all crack-block the HS offerings of America, I would like to suggest Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata.
He liked to drink spirits and the spirits he drank were actually spirits.
Yes, you know Snow Country, and good for you, but Kawabata himself, especially later in his life, repeatedly asked readers to turn to his 140+ (like Carver stories stuffed in closet drawers, new ones seem to spontaneously unearth) very short stories. He claimed they contained his essence.
I find his sentences airy, floating, lonely, but the type of paradoxical loneliness we recognize as our own. In sum: He is a big man. His words will auto-tune your ass.
Children found him amusing.
His final work was to rewrite his popular novel, Snow Country, as a flash fiction. He then killed himself.
(Have I convinced the anti-flash [flashcist] yet?)
Nope.
OK, bring out the rainmaker:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05b5ylz-5iQ