Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
I am very blue to learn this afternoon of Cami Park’s passing. Cami lived in Nevada, and she was a sly and observant writer, someone whose work knew the world tenderly and could—as Scott Garson put it—”wake you up where you sleep.” Cami was also a generous and delightful person to correspond with. Read some of her work at Fictionaut, Necessary Fiction, Night Train, PANK, and No Tell Motel. Her blog can be found here. I am sad to have never met Cami Park in person to tell her how much I enjoyed her writing. Her story “Everyone the Same But Not At Once” appeared in NOÖ [11], and I’ve excerpted it below the jump. Cami’s words will live on and around in these windows of ours. She will be missed. READ MORE >
The traffic is bad today. Stay home and paint your mustache dusk, lace mustard with cocaine, crash your plane on a beach, fly a goat kite, fight a snow goose, make yourself independent of daylight, or let other people enact these things for your brain eyes by reading the newly-released NOÖ [12]. You can also find out what some people think about books from Dorothea Lasky, Adam Gallari, Alissa Nutting, Ben Mirov, and more. You can look at ghostly illustrations from Christy Call. You can end with skirt steak. You can go home again, Dorothy. Just don’t drive.
Have you ever had a dream with characters from a book you read? Do you want to talk about this dream and win a free copy of Dennis Cooper’s Smothered In Hugs for doing so? Go here. Making dreams up is > okay.
How do million dollar math prizes, kids with semi-automatics, a wine bottle full of ocean water, and a sculptor’s pet raven raise themselves in unison? In Werner Herzog’s eloquent and stirring remarks on sublimity is how.
Remember how a wave is a loanword from sign language? How poor is a diet of opossums? How sometimes there’s a different kind of power in the afternoon, or you are your own wife (you long to punch yourself), and you cry because you’re dating your friends’ dads and because the fire is beautiful, because you had no desire for work but work found you, such a very productive entrepreneur, all young and dressed in Technicolor, like all the secret gears and the way you have to start the fire yourself. Remember? No? That’s because you haven’t read the new issue of Sixth Finch. Poems. Art. Both. Check it out.
Hey, Bradley Sands is declaring war on Betty White to promote his new book of stories My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes!. Maybe the only indie lit sales gimmick I’ve seen involving theoretical senior citizen violence? Check it out.
Over at We Who Are About To Die, Daniel Nester posted a letter from Nas to his label, Def Jam. MTV News spoke to an unnamed source from Nas’s “camp” who confirmed the letter: “”It was a personal e-mail,” the source said. “[The leak] wasn’t planned. It was not meant to be blasted out in the world, but we’re not upset about it.”” You should read the letter, which I feel maybe has some interesting relevance to so-called “indie lit.” And to even broader notions of privacy/publicity/social interaction/creative culture/cultural capital on the internet/feelings. I know less than most people about rap, so I don’t know how legit/awesome Nas is, but I feel like the letter is fun. Here are fun quotes:
“I could go on twitter or hot 97 tomorrow and get 100,000 protesters @ your building but I choose to walk my own path my own way because since day one I have been my own man.”
“People connect to the Artist @ the end of the day, they don’t connect with the executives. Honestly, nobody even cares what label puts out a great record, they care about who recorded it.”
“I have a fan base that dies for my music and a RAP label that doesn’t understand RAP.”
A cool new video series from Coldfront and Eye For An Iris Press, Tourist Trap, NYC follows and films poets visiting NYC. These people walk around and talk interestingly about things, and then they read some poems. Sort of like a Take Away Show for people who write/read poems. The first episode features Julie Doxsee, who has graced HTMLGIANT a little in the past. Forthcoming episodes will feature Matt Hart, Nate Pritts, Josh Harmon, Kate Greenstreet, and more. By posting this, of course, I am hoping soon I will be invited to appear on an episode where I’m filmed alone in my apartment, killing silverfish with a tambourine and ruefully/wistfully clicking “Not Attending” on every Facebook invitation I get for another event in “the city.” Jays and cakes! Tourist Trap, NYC is a sweet looking project, so take a look.
Bump bump go the books on the top of the site. This site, I mean. When you roll your mouse over one of these books, they leap. When your mouse departs, they crunch back into the title banner like some old Atari obstacle. O obnoxious HTMLGIANT, where the hustle never sleeps. A recent commenter said, in fact, that she actually refrains from buying stuff recommended here because of all the “nepotism and over-hype.”
I mean, that’s fair. We’re probably not friends, dear reader. Statistically, you probably don’t know who I am, and I probably don’t know who you are.
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“i like the feeling you get / from lies through omission / they make you feel / like a weird little / phantom”
One of the poems early in Kendra Grant Malone’s collection, Everything Is Quiet, talks about that moment after a good movie when we all have to accept the movie wasn’t real. When two people hang out in that moment, it’s excruciating, because they know “you have to / speak at some point / and you have to shatter / what you were just feeling / a moment before.” Much later in the collection, the speaker—let’s just say Malone because that’s what Malone says—talks about people who are “very beautiful” and other people who are “very drunk,” but ends talking about how she has no one to talk to “at this very / moment.” And it’s that isolation of Very-flavored moments that this book lives to talk about. Even though these spindly, skinny poems are gorged with excesses of violence (sexual and otherwise), excesses of ingestion and injection, their main concern is excessive solitude. Which gets no worse than when two people who want to be together are stuck living through those moments they don’t want to be together. READ MORE >