http://themanwhocouldntblog.blogspot.com
Matthew Simmons is the author of a novella (A JELLO HORSE, Publishing Genius Press, 2009) and a chapbook (THE MOON TONIGHT FEELS MY REVENGE, Keyhole Press, 2010). He is a bookseller living in Seattle with his cat Emmett.
Had he not committed suicide in 1970—and not died of old age in the last few years—he’d be 75 today. If you don’t own Spirits Rejoice, there is a hole in your record collection.
Paper Towel, June 3, 2011, Jeffrey Simmons
I have a small file cabinet under my desk that has in it scraps of paper with notes—on notebook paper, printer paper, index cards, Post-It notes, and even (yeesh) napkins. Early drafts of stories—from a time when I wrote everything long hand first, and then typed them up—are in there. Little bits of research that I printed out, glanced at, and then decided to ignore. Pictures I took out of magazines.
There’s another pile on my bookshelf that’s twice the size of my mid-sized cat.
Why am I keeping it all? I thought about throwing it away, recently, READ MORE >
I seem to remember there being a time when a whole bunch of writer types were really excited or really curious or really thinking deeply about using the internet to write stories, and because a page on the internet can be a place to place text and a place to place pictures and a place to embed music and a place to embed video and all that, it was going to be really exciting and revolutionary. And I seem to remember writer types in universities thinking maybe they had to jump on all this and think even more deeply about it and maybe thinking that they needed to start a whole side-discipline for hypertext.
I seem to remember all this, but it came and went so damn quickly, I can’t be 100% sure. And, frankly, I’m too tired to search it all out on the Internet Archive. Go for it, if you’re interested. If I made all of it up, give me hell in the comments section, maybe.
All that is just a prologue for two stories on the internet: OH NO EVERYTHING IS WET NOW, an ebook/web collage/thing/”pseudo small novella in verse” on our own Mike Young’s Magic Helicopter Press site, and “Neverland” by Gabriel Blackwell on the Uncanny Valley Press site. READ MORE >
“Lin mumbled that he and Johnson aren’t really speaking to each other…Lin said that it was because Johnson “didn’t approve of the relationship” in Lin’s latest novel.” Should a publisher like the books they publish? Shouldn’t they?
In New York graffiti’s Golden Age, one of it’s most respected and prolific writers was—according to the eye witness account of another writer—a shy, eldery white woman who simply wanted everyone to accept Jesus. How will you spend your dotage?
Mulholland Drive, the TV pilot. From Mark Gluth (and the Dennis Cooper blog), Didion vs. Lynch.
Here. Now. Today. Ofelia Hunt‘s Today & Tomorrow. I read it and liked it very much. (No surprise. No offense meant to any of the other wonderful books from Bear Parade, but My Eventual Bloodless Coup is the site’s monster.)
Today is her birthday. Her sisters are Merna and Anastasia, who once told her it was good luck to touch all doorknobs. Her boyfriends are Aaron, whom she just met, and Erik, whose name is actually Todd. Her grandfather worked in a tin can factory. Now he bakes blueberry pies and laughs and says it’s all true. In the Carlsbad Caverns, Bill Murray wields a giant robot, swallowing families. Today is in Wal-Mart, in Denny’s, at the ice rink. Tomorrow there will be blood on the zamboni. Tomorrow there will be a voice that locks the door behind her. Set among haunted parking lots and AM-PMs and home invasions, Today & Tomorrow melts identity, memory, and consciousness into a hypnotic and hilarious adventure of body and mind, the haunting absurdity of what it means to be a person that can make up everything but itself.
“This book would like to give you an ice cream, but you will have to get in the van.” — Amelia Gray, author of Museum of the Weird
Michael Kimball is now the author of three of my favorite books. Before I read his latest, US, I had read and loved THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY. Before I read US, I read and really, really loved DEAR EVERYBODY. And before I read US, I had purchased but had not yet gotten to HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS.
Now there’s US: disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as achingly sad a book as I have ever read. I had to stop a couple of times. I really did. The book’s elderly couple—so painfully aware of the fact that one of them is living the last parts of her life—are drawn so concisely, and the situation is so precisely rendered, it was hard not to spend all my time living in it even when I wasn’t reading the book.
Michael and I talked about DEAR EVERYBODY when it came out. When US appeared, we thought it might be nice to talk again.
***
Started your book last night. You are going to break my heart again, aren’t you?
Yes, but in a different way.
Why do our hearts have to break in so many different ways?
It’s one of the surprising things about life, right? When we learn that that can happen.
Or,
I think that it’s partly a structural issue, the heart’s strange shape. READ MORE >
“Yet underneath its surface challenges, THERE IS NO YEAR turns out to be deeply honest and emotional, a family drama that by its end brings on feelings as complex and satisfying as those summoned by Faulkner’s simple sentence “They endured.”—Joseph Salvatore, New York Times Sunday Book Review
Seventy-one years ago today, John Cage debuted his prepared piano on stage at Seattle’s Repertory Playhouse. In honor, edit an old story of yours by adding a few new nouns.
The LA Review of Books is now live and updating online. THE DEATH OF THE BOOK: “It is possible to regard much of Western avant garde poetry and prose as an extended argument with the bound pages from which literature would prefer to break free.” BUSTER KEATON AND THE WORLD OF OBJECTS: “Keaton takes the bat and systematically smashes every pane in every bookcase, puts the bat aside, sits down, says nothing.”
Above is video of the reaction of José Saramago to the filmed version of his book Blindness. READ MORE >
A reminder: The prayer-as-story, story-as-prayer web journal On Earth As It Is, which I edit with my buddy Bryan, is accepting submissions through April 30. The work we accept will make up the last round of weekly updates on the site. Submit here. (If you have any questions, leave them in the comments for this post and I will answer them as best I can.)
Did you buy How They Were Found by Matt Bell? He wants to give you a free ebook. Details on his blog.
So. Cyber-punk.
“Johnny Mnemonic” can’t get past just being Johnny Mnemonic. “Burk’s Nub,” though, gets to be Tetsuo The Iron Man, and “Burk’s Nub,” gets to be George Washington.
Because “Burk’s Nub” isn’t concerned with the gadgetry of cyber-punk. It’s just concerned with youth, with bodies, with tubas, and with language. And because it is full of concern and not full of fetish, it gets to be fuller and more satisfying and more interesting. READ MORE >
UbuWeb Sound is filled with happiness, of course. Here’s some recent happiness: The Tape-Beatles discography. Plagiarism can often be a really beautiful thing. Additionally: Big City Orchestra’s sublime—and unpleasantly named—Beatlerape.
A head’s up: writers who have enjoyed the On Earth As It Is project, and would like to try to write something for it, will soon have that chance. My co-editor and I will have open submissions through the month of April. (I’ll make note of it here and on our Facebook page.) Also, the work we choose will become the last round of updates for the site. The site will remain up and the stories available to be read, but we will no longer add to it.
So tell me about the name of the new record, Illuminati Thug Mafia?
It’s kinda like the unseen terrible, you know what I mean. All these things have a negative mythology to them. At the same time these organizations, you know that none of us completely know, have their own culture individually. You hear Illuminati, you hear thug, you hear mafia you kind of dismissed it instantly, or at least a degree where you prepare what the the fuck you’re gonna hear. You already prepare yourself to already not believe it, take it with a grain of salt. In a way combine all three of those and it kind of like it’s some real super power, the ultimate fucking ridiculousness.
I went to the Getty recently, and saw an exhibit of illuminated manuscripts. READ MORE >
