Apples and Cheese: Both in Your Mouth
Rauan Klassink’s Ringing, a new e-book from Kitchen Press. Sam Pink just interviewed Rauan a few hours ago, which means it’s almost outdated. Mercy!
PAIRS DELICIOUSLY WITH:
Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. A novel that should be as indie-revered as any you can name by Yipzeeny, Kurdledonk, or Qqqqqqqq. But people never mention it? Is it because Thomas Pynchon liked it? Is it because it’s about a bisexual love triangle and a dead Native American Catholic saint? Is it because Montreal? It is because God of? You’re like, “Is that the Hallelujah guy? Didn’t he write that cute Suzanne song?” Is it because of Charles Atlas or a mystical dildo? Are you afraid? Cohen called Beautiful Losers more of a sunstroke than a novel. People turn into movie projectors. People cancel a statue of Queen Victoria. Hey, when you get a chance, you should buy your new favorite novel:
There is a god
via USA Today:
NEW YORK (AP) — A long, unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for a posthumous release next year.The Pale King, excerpted in The New Yorker magazine edition coming out Monday, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s.
Wallace’s longtime publisher, Little, Brown and Company, will release the novel. Little, Brown said in a statement Sunday that the novel runs “several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines, and other material.”
Wallace, best known for the 1,000-page novel Infinite Jest, was a longtime sufferer from depression who committed suicide last fall. He was 46 and had been working on The Pale King for several years.
Sure, it wasn’t finished. Sure, it might not be fully what it would have been if completed under David Wallace’s human eye. But it’s what we have left, and I for one can breathe a little easier now knowing I will have the experience of reading another brick from my brother, even in such light.
I seriously pumped my fist and grinned and shook a little when I read this. I am giddy.
Thank you thank you.
EDIT: The NYer excerpt piece, Wiggle Room, is now available on their site here!!! Which, holy fuck, the first sentence: Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk’s row in the rotes group’s wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month.
And holy fuck the whole rest…
BONUS: a few pages of the manuscript, with notes, etc, as well as accompanying art by his wife Karen Green.
God.
This should be, I think, seen as a celebration, regardless of the sadder angles. As one who could not have adored him more, it seems more vital now than ever.
Where are you, Jereme? I Miss you.
Where are you Jereme? I miss you. That’s all.
Win Sam Pink’s book, I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT!!!!
Htmlgiant and Paper Hero Press are sponsoring a contest to win Sam Pink’s I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT!!!!!!! We are giving away THREE COPIES to the best entries! Here is the contest, people: Give us your best description of a fight that made you physically ill in 50 words or less. Enter in the comments section,(you can enter more than once and you can make shit up). Barry Graham, the publisher of Paper Hero Press, Sam Pink himself, and yours truly are the judges. Barf vomit blood and tears people. We love you.
Sam contemplates death, bones, violence and blood often in his book. That said, here’s a quote from the book that isn’t like that:
When You Are Happy Do A Handstand
When you are happy do a handstand and step into the sky. Go knee-deep. And push your feet through the depths. Start thinking about where the bottom is and what it feels like and if you’re not too stupid or scared to touch it.
(Full disclosure: I offered to cuddle naked with Sam Pink at the AWP in Chicago a week or so ago (even though I wasn’t there), but he declined. Then, it turned out it wasn’t Sam Pink. It was Mary Gaitskill.I was wicked drunk.)
‘Steve Reich Hears a Pentecostal Preacher’ by Adam Robinson, from ‘Adam Robison’
It’s not quite available for the masses yet, but to get you hype for the forthcoming release of Adam Robinson‘s debut book of poems, pleasantly titled ‘Adam Robison and Other Poems’ (and forthcoming in the next few months from Narrow House Press) we’ve got two special treats lined up.
The first is said book’s publisher’s new blog: Narrow House press blog, which is a pleasant introduction to the group and their releases, which span from records to full length poetry books.
Secondly, culled from what might be quite a length of dirty video recordings captured this weekend at the post-510 Reading Series bar assault (in which your current blogger and said ‘Adam Robison’ aka ‘Magic Acorn’ were asked to ‘stop wrestling in the bar or leave’), is Adam Robinson’s fine drunken performance of his poem ‘Steve Reich Hears a Pentecostal Preacher.’
Please enjoy (and thanks to Michael Kimball for the sweet capture).
You should have seen him breakdancing a few minutes later. It was a poem in itself. Though the guys at the pizza shop were less thrilled with Adam and some other weird dude screaming about dick and pouring water on each other in a beer haze. Poem video life.
Also, for your consumption, the brilliant introduction to ‘Adam Robison,’ published here at Otoliths, which contains the paragraph:
So what’s the story, Anne Carson? I mean, what’s my story? I’m riding my bike home with a video camera strapped to the handlebars, through the glittering downtown into the crumbling neighborhoods of Baltimore’s east side.
I, for one, am quite excited.
NYT loves “Telephone,” the new play by Ariana Reines
The play is an adaptation of Avital Ronnell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, a critical theory text which, according to that same NYT critic, was “created at the height of Derrida-style deconstructionism and laid out (by the graphic designer Richard Eckersley) in the style of a Dadaist phone book… Under the direction of Ken Rus Schmoll, a cast of three and a sharp-eyed design team turn what might have come across as gobbledygook into a stylish and stimulating show.”
So cheers, Ariana, and to everyone in NYC, the show is playing at Cherry Lane Theatre through February 28th (even though there doesn’t seem to be anything written about it on CLT’s website) so catch it while you can.
MORE OF ARIANA REINES
The Cow which won Fence’s Alberta Prize, was published in 2006.
Coeur de Lion was published by mal-o-mar editions in 2008. I wrote about Coeur de Lion (and Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf) in my FLAUNT magazine column (print only- it appeared in issue #100).
The Agriculture Reader #3, the magazine I co-edit, contains a new piece of prose by Ariana Reines.
Ariana Reines poems at Coconut Poetry.
The real deal. To the real deal's immediate right (photographer's left), wearing his signature green hoodie, basically not in the photograph, is yours truly. - Stain Bar, Brooklyn, 2008.
Pasha Malla, we salute you
Right now, my buddy Pasha Malla‘s gmail status say “BEST WEEK FRIGGIN’ EVER.” True enough.
Pasha’s first book, The Withdrawal Method, was for a time available up in a country called Canada from a publisher called Anansi. Any day now, said book will be available in a country called the United States of America from a publisher called Soft Skull.
He was longlisted for the Giller Prize.
It was also one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books of the year.
And now, Pasha’s book has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean category.
Cheers, Pasha.
Follow this link to read some stuff Pasha has written.
Here’s a favorite humor piece that appeared on McSweeney’s: THE BOMBAY PALACE ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET: A POST COLONIAL PERSPECTIVE.
Crickets by Aram Saroyan
You know how in the future all the animals will be dead because of global warming or global climate change, and all our meat will be either human meat or meat grown in large vats? When all the animals will just be robots?
I want, when that happens, to replace the sound all the crickets make—all the crickets who live with me under my glass dome—to have their chirping sounds replaced with an endless loop of this recording of Aram Saroyan reading his poem “Crickets.”
If you are a person who can help me make this happen when the future arrives, please contact me now (giantblinditems at gmail dot com) so we can keep in touch. The future could sneak up on us.
Among my favorite works of minimalist art (the paintings of Agnes Martin, the sculptures of Donald Judd, the music of Steve Reich), there are the poems of Aram Saroyan. Follow this link to read some of his work.
Aram Saroyan pissed off Jesse Helms in seven letters. Clearly, he is an absolute good.
Funnily enough, on the subject of Minimalism, I don’t have much to say.
El Lit: An HTMLGIANT AWP Reading
There will be plenty to eat, tear, and ram at AWP. But will there be a train to ride on which you can listen to people read/shout things, a train you can ride in a state of listening all the way to a reading at the Book Cellar?
Yes. Yes there will be.
Here’s how it works:
(1) On Friday, Feb 13, we meet at the Library Brown El Line Station (1 W Van Buren St), Northbound to Kimball Platform @ 8:45 pm. Look for the SIGN and the CROWD.
(2) We ride and read and ride to the Book Cellar (4736-38 North Lincoln Avenue), arriving around 9:30 PM, where we read and laugh and see and read and see and yes.
Come! Yes! Come! Spread the Word!
Featuring:
Craig Griffin, Mary Miller, Heather Christle, Blake Butler, Mike Young, Shane Jones, Sam Pink, Joseph Young, Elizabeth Ellen, Leigh Stein, Ryan Call, Daniel Bailey
