Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Sometimes People Put Writing on the Internet
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 >
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July 7th, 2011 / 12:30 pm
July 7th, 2011 / 12:30 pm
Matthew Simmons—
“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?
Matthew Simmons—
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?
Matthew Simmons—
Mulholland Drive, the TV pilot. From Mark Gluth (and the Dennis Cooper blog), Didion vs. Lynch.
Today & Tomorrow Today
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
Elliot Feels His Feelings: an interview with Michael Kimball
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 >
Matthew Simmons—
“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
Matthew Simmons—
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.
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