Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Today in Big Publishing’s Dying Shudder
Oh, hey! Another editor has managed to convince his bosses that his internet addiction is not a huge drain on company time and bandwidth by getting a freely accessed photo blog turned into a book!
Harper Big Wig into phone: Nelson? Get into my office. Now.
Nelson, entering: Yes boss?
HBW: Nelson, I don’t know if you are aware of this, but all the office computers now have spyware on them. According to our records, you spent all of last week surfing the internet.
N: Uh. Well, sure. I was…doing…research?
HBW: Research? Why weren’t you reading the slush pile? Did you find anything?
N: [Pause.]
HBW: Well?
N: A blog with pictures of fried foods?
HBW: Nelson, you’ve done it again! Let’s get a contract drawn up.
And scene.
Keep throwing shit against the wall, fellas. Something is bound to stick.
Literary Lessons from Metal Magazines: Double bass drum day
How about two metal posts today? This is from Terrorizer, an English EXTREME METAL magazine. Richard Hoak, drummer for Brutal Truth, has this band called Total Fucking Destruction. What follows is a synopsis of the concept around which they wrote their most recent album: READ MORE >
In Ten Senses
Next time you have an hour, go listen to poet (and officially recognized by a Seattle alt-weekly, genius) Heather McHugh deliver a lecture on art called “In Ten Senses: Some Sentences About Art’s Senses and Intents.”
Go out and look for her work, too. Don’t be fooled by McHugh’s obvious affection for the sounds of words and their multiple meanings. She is much more than merely clever. She has a dark, comic sensibility, too, but is not simply a creator of black comedy. McHugh’s got levels to her.
James Purdy died today.
…
And, really, fuck the rest of us.
A Little Friday Inspiration
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.”
Now let’s get out there and write some fiction or poetry, people.
Poe sorry for his drinking. Butler, not.
Here:
“Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York?,” Poe asks New York publishers J. and Henry G. Langley. “You must have conceived a queer idea of me — but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.”
Compare, contrast to this in the comments.
Best compare/contrast wins a prize. Or two. I have lots of galleys and am cleaning house. Prize packages tailored to the tastes of the winner.
UPDATE:
Apologies for vagueness. In the comments, write a short essay (Oh, even just a paragraph long) comparing and contrasting Poe’s apology for his drunken behavior in New York to the video of our fearless leader screeching drunkenly about smoothies when he visited New York a couple of years ago. The video is linked to the word “this” because I was unable to embed it.
Power Quote
“Both writers were inimitable even as they were widely imitated. Carver, younger, less productive, a practitioner of a spare gritty realism often called minimalism, was the junior executive. Donald Barthelme—sparkling fabulist and idiosyncratic reinventor of the genre, practitioner of swift verbal collages, also sometimes dubbed minimalism—was commander in chief. Barthelme’s particular brilliance was so original, so sui generis, despite its tutelage at the feet of pages by Joyce, Beckett, and Stein, that even his own brothers Frederick and Steven, also fiction writers of intelligence and style, wrote more like Carver.”
—Lorrie Moore, “How He Wrote His Songs“
Also…
Justin, get your ass back to HTMLGiant and get to work.
(Our own Justin Taylor has a post up at Dennis Cooper’s blog, The Weaklings, about X-ing Books.)
(A prize package to anyone who can correctly guess the significance of the image on top of this post. Books and stuff.)
Rimbaud vlog
From the Poetry Foundation blog, harriet, the Rimbaud Vlog.
The man behind the mask is Travis Nichols, whose Weird Deer blog took a short hiatus so he could concentrate on getting Obama elected. (See, poets? See what you can do if you get off the computer for a little while. Obama WAS elected. And Travis Nichols was, I’m betting, was instrumental in that election.)
The blog is slowly returning. Maybe if we all go look at it, he will feel pressured to keep the Weird Deer Hotline series going. Details in the blogs upper right hand corner.
Travis is a fellow Seattle-ite and a pretty nice guy. He has a novel called Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder in the works at Coffee House Press. And writing online.
He does not like applejuice. That is another Travis Nichols.
