Bloody Nose Contest: Win Joe Hall’s Pigafetta Is My Wife
Blake recently posted a nice spotlight on Joe Hall’s Pigafetta Is My Wife. So now I’d like to announce a fun contest in light of his post: the Bloody Nose Contest, the three winners of which will receive a copy of Joe’s book.
If you’d like a chance at winning Pigafetta Is My Wife, please send to htmlgiant@htmlgiant.com (or leave your entry in a comment with your email address) an entry that somehow includes a bloody nose. Why bloody noses? Well, Joe is a compulsive collector of bloody noses. Entries can be illustrations, photographs, poems, short stories, photographs of napkins or other tissue that you used to stop your bloody nose, maps and/or diagrams of bloody noses, famous bloody noses in history, bloody nose encyclopedia entries, bloody nose nursery rhymes, bloody nose songs, etc. Joe will pick his top three bloody nose-related thingies, and to those winners he will send a signed copy of the book. He might bleed on the book a little. He might also send with the book a bit of rubbish from the beach by his house. He would offer more prizes, he says, but he lives in a house that is halfway boarded up, so he has nothing else to give you. Maybe he’ll send a piece of his house?
Let’s say the deadline for this contest is 11:59pm, Saturday, April 24th, at which point I’ll send the submissions on to Joe.
And if you don’t win, please give a thought to buying the book!
After the jump you’ll find a miniature interview with Joe.
Dead/Dying Authors Rejoice
Nadine Jarvis has designed a pencil ‘made from the carbon of human remains.’
240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind. Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings – a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.
For more information about The Postmortem Project, please go here.
Book Pots
![[recycled+pot+books-1.jpg]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_WyGYQI44Eh0/S6jsc64NsiI/AAAAAAAAAsY/uRvO10GVQDk/s1600/recycled%2Bpot%2Bbooks-1.jpg)
What are the best book/plant combinations you can think of?
The Day of the Triffids is probably too easy.
(via NotCot)
@MoMa
Paola Antonelli of MoMa has written an short post dedicated to celebrating MoMa’s ‘acquiring’ the @ symbol into the collection. I didn’t know much about the @ symbol, so I thought it was a pretty good read. Here’s a bit for you:
The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, [Ray] Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol.
Brian Evenson’s &NOW Reading
Please enjoy this three part video of Brian Evenson reading at &NOW last fall. He read “South of the Beast,” a story he says he wrote in his late twenties, as well as “Windeye,” published in PEN America 11, and then “A Pursuit” and “Invisible Box,” both from Fugue State.
(via @Caketrain)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhiOKyBwNUA
Parts 2 and 3 after the break.
Ryan Call—
Everyone, NOÖ 11 is here! Please enjoy and have a good day! I am in a really good mood today!
10
Some neat book sculptures from Paul Octavious.
A team of publishing nerds Tumblrs what New Yorkers are reading on the subway (etc.) at CoverSpy.
The OED costs $200ish a year to access, but you can enjoy for free their word-of-the-day feature (thanks, jh).
Coudal Partners field tests some books with the help of Jonathan Messinger, Ron Hogan, Eric Sptiznagel, and Jessa Crispin.
One Story is offering editorial mentorships for writers who’d like some thoughts on their work ($25 for 15minutes).
That’s all I’ve got for now.
Archive of David Foster Wallace @ UTAustin
Looks like UT-Austin has acquired David Foster Wallace’s archive. From the press release:
Highlights include handwritten notes and drafts of his critically acclaimed “Infinite Jest,” the earliest appearance of his signature “David Foster Wallace” on “Viking Poem,” written when he was six or seven years old, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.
You can look at some of the notes he made inside the books in his library here. And here are some notes he made in his dictionaries. The archive will be available to researchers next fall.
(Thanks, jh, for the tip)
Eschaton Lite
When my sister and I were little, we sometimes played around our house a very loose adaptation of Calvin Ball. Our version involved one of those big Koosh balls that were popular in the late 80s, as well as other objects and toys and so on. We also ran up and down the hallway a lot. I don’t remember who won or how we scored it or whatever. I just remember that we had fun.
I say all of this above in order to set up a very enthusiastic hurrah for these people, who have organized a game of Eschaton in Minneapolis. Anyone else seen this? They seem to be very serious about it. They have an extensive rule book. They are planning ahead a month in advance. They will not bring dogs to the event.
Keith Pille, the author of the rule book to Eschaton Lite, writes on the event wall:
One thing we could do with a month of lead-time: figure out what sort of game-scale works. My half-assed experimentation in the back yard tells me that i can’t throw a tennis ball with much accuracy for more than 30 feet (it also tells me that we shouldn’t have a dog on hand, because she’ll try to catch and run off with our warheads). I’ll do some more experimenting to see what sort of scale/target size would really work for us. I think ideally, you want targets to be hittable but not automatic…
I hope they take pictures or post a debriefing or make a video.
(via @TheLiftedBrow)