Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Michael Martone : Michael Martone : Michael Martone
:
Michael Martone on William Gass, the most important contemporary fiction writer. Of the lessons he learned from “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”, he says: READ MORE >
Weekend Writing Prompt: Make it rain.
Hiphop has moved—swaggered, even—on from the 2006 rules and regulations. Sure it has. So—yes, I guess—we’re well past making it rain on country’s exotic dancers. Or, well, they’re well past it, those who make themselves their livings rhyming over a usually 4/4 beat.
But maybe you don’t have to be. Over it, I mean. (I mean, who are you to follow the moving-on happenings in the game of being on the grind, right?)
So this weekend when you sit down to do a little writing, do it with a little of the lesson somewhere in Ms. Hoang’s earlier-today lovely disorganalia on overwriting by going in on a story and overwriting it to the point where you move past a disappointing lack of discipline to that moment where excess overwhelms all its many sins and leaves one’s writing in a pure state. Pile on the muck until the muck becomes the point and the muck becomes the beauty.
And if you don’t feel like making it rain in that way, make it rain like this:
READ MORE >
Misremembering the ending
A childhood trauma:
I am five or six and I am watching the animated version of Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child. At the end of this film, the mouse—a windup toy—and his child—same—find themselves at the bottom of a lake, and find themselves staring at a can of dog food. On the can of dog food is a recursive image: a dog standing next to a can of dog food with a label that features that dog standing next to a can of dog food with a label that features…
The toy mice are stuck at the bottom of the lake, peering into the label, the child tasked with counting the number of dogs. And so the child does forever and ever and ever, and the film ends, and I am sent to bed, and I spend the subsequent decades sometimes pondering the concept of eternity until I am filled with anxiety and my neck begins to sweat. One dog, two dogs, three dogs, four…
After the cut is the animated version of The Mouse and His Child. Skip ahead 50 or so minutes to watch the scene in question.
READ MORE >
Matthew Simmons—
All the books I read in 2011: go to your local independent bookseller—if such a thing exists in your town—and reserve a copy of Patrick deWitt’s dark, deep, and deadly funny upcoming novel The Sisters Brothers. It’s a western. It’s spare and has existential undercurrents. The narrator is a husky-bodied, quiet-talking killer. It’ll be out in May.
DESTROY ALL MOVIES!!! (A Holiday recommendation)
My first college roommate had a bookshelf filled with those big-format subculture guidebooks: The Trouser Press Record Guide, The Psychotronic Video Guide to Film, High Weirdness by Mail, the RE/SEARCH publications. I had been a normal kid in junior high, and began going weird in high school when my family moved to a small town. I had had to connect to all my weirdness through a couple of old issues of Thrasher, a couple of issues of MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL, and a single copy of Flipside that I bought from the local record store. (I think they had ordered it in by mistake. It looked out of place next to Hit Parader and Kerrang!) Needful to say, probably, when I was a teenager, we plugged our home computer into the wall and into a printer, but couldn’t even conceive of plugging it into a phone jack. READ MORE >
Damn, yeah!
Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit is re-released with a beautiful new cover. (Just a bit of it above. Link on through for the whole pretty thing.)
Higgs reviewed it here. If you missed it on the first go round, hop on for the new one, you. There’s some new goodness.
Matthew Simmons—
“…[Y]ou’ll never become the writer you want to become. You’ll never be satisfied, never really know if you are any good. You’ll never be certain.”—from a 1998 letter by Dean Young to his nephew, the writer Seth Pollins. The entire thing is here, and it’s well worth reading. (Worth relinking to this open letter from Tony Hoagland about Dean’s current medical problems, I think.)