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.
It occurred to me, hanging out with Mike Young last weekend, that I/maybe we have not talked enough about Mike’s really fantastic collection of stories, LOOK! LOOK! FEATHERS here on HTML Giant. I will endeavor to do so, to at least offer an impression of each story, over the coming weeks.
So, PART ONE.
Placed at the beginning of the book of stories is “The Peaches Are Cheap,” a flash meant maybe not just to be itself, but meant instead to be the slow, disjointed, “look around, case the joint,” opening of all that comes after. It’s a couple of dudes in a car, and all the stuff they see—all this stuff that promises to act like hooks through the rest of the book. These hooks on which we hang the answers to our “where the fuck are we” questions. Hang the things we unpack to learn about where the whole where of the book is. READ MORE >
The inspiration for HTML Giant is discussed in this fine interview with His Most Massive, Blake Butler.
What follows is a list of writers who amaze me.
Locals: Roxane Gay • Evelyn Hampton • Lily Hoang • Kristen Iskandrian • Catherine Lacey • Chelsea Martin • Amy McDaniel • Alissa Nutting • Alexis Orgera • Jackie Wang
Notables: Amelia Gray • Aimee Bender • Judy Budnitz • Trinie Dalton • Christine Schutt • Jac Jemc • Lydia Millet • Catie Rosemurgy • Claire Donato • Renata Adler • Leni Zumas • Eudora Welty • Eileen Myles • Amber Sparks • Flannery O’Connor • Joyelle McSweeney • Jackie Corley • Patricia Highsmith • Ellen Bryan Voigt • Mary Ruefle • Myla Goldberg • Karen Russel. Carolyn Chute • Kathrine Dunn • Mary Miller • Kate Walbert • Amy Hempel • Amanda Filipacchi • Tillie Olsen • Joanna Howard • Claudia Smith • Melissa Broder • Grace Paley • Katherine Anne Porter • Pagan Kennedy • Suzanne Burns • Victoria Blake • Sandy Florian • Shirley Jackson • Emily Dickinson • Marcy Dermansky • Lorrie Moore • Kate Bernheimer • Alice Munro • Kim Chinquee • Francine Prose • Janet Frame • Brandi Wells • Robin Romm • Mary Robison • Antonya Nelson READ MORE >
Charles Baxter on “Owl Criticism”: “To say that something is ‘boring’ is not a statement about a book, although the speaker may think that it is; it’s a statement about the reader’s poverty of equipment.” (That’s the pithiest line. Many less pithy, more fiercely argued and substantial lines are included in the essay, as well.)
Protest songs—once a total downer—can now INCLUDE STAR WARS REFERENCES! Things are better now. (In all seriousness, though, you should send IfIHadAHiFi a buck for their anti-Scott Walker song “Imperial Walker.” We’re all Wisconsin now.)
One of the winners at last night’s Oscars was a short animated film by a guy named Shaun Tan. The film is called The Lost Thing. And it was far and away the best of the nominated shorts. (The Pixar thing was fine. The pollution thing was fine. The Gruffalo was kind of terrible. The Madagascar piece looked nice but was sort of empty.) But, deserved to win, did win. Who knew?
Here I admit a bit of a bias: I really like Shaun Tan. So I was bound to favor his piece over any of the others. And I really like Shaun Tan because I really, really like his bookThe Red Tree. READ MORE >
Hey, AWP! Which books from the last year are you, when they come up in conversation, pretending to have read? I’ll start, even though I’m not there. If it came up, I’d be telling people I’ve read The Fixed Stars by Brian Conn. (I bought it at AWP last year, started it, enjoyed it, set it aside for something else, and then haven’t gotten back to it. Still, I’d lie and tell everyone I finished it.)
Do what is best for you.
Relax. Follow through. But make it.
Jamie Iredell. Future Tense. The Book of Freaks. March.
Oh, hell yes.
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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 >
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 >
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 >
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.
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 >
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.
