Blake Butler—
Christian Lorentzen profiles Tao Lin for the New York Observer, writing in a ‘parody of his style.’ What do you think, did he nail it?
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Alber, Mike. The Baby Jar (a graphic novel in bi-weekly installments)
Mike Alber is large, he contains multitudes. He is also the proud owner of a case of Crystal Pepsi from 1994. A recent graduate of Ohio State’s MFA in fiction writing, Mike has come to L.A. to sell out to the film and television industry. Also, a warning to the ladies: Mike Alber will knock you up as quick as look at you. Those who aren’t on Nuva-Ring are recommended not to make direct eye contact with the screen, instead viewing the novel through a hole punched in a shoe box.
Joseph Young’s NAME
I posted this video for the line, “You gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent,” but watching it now and digging it, I’m struck by how the whole thing applies to Joseph Young’s new novel, NAME. Not the tone or the shots from Lollapalooza, but all those crowd scenes juxtaposed with Mark Ibold looking all lonely has its parallels. So just watch that video but listen to Bauhaus and right there you’ve made the movie adaptation of Joe’s book.
Dues paid, Joe wrote NAME last month to pay next month’s rent. You can buy the book for a donation of at least $10 to this cause. Well, hell, that’s cool, and pretty cheap for a 25,000 word novel. That it was written in a matter of weeks, to me, makes it even better. Look what this guy can do. READ MORE >
Julie Doxsee’s Favorite Object Combinations And Favorite Objects To Leave By Themselves
Julie Doxsee is doing a “blog tour” for her terrific new book, Objects For a Fog Death, so I asked Julie to write about her 5 favorite object combinations and her 5 favorite objects to leave by themselves. She did us better than my essaystic suggestion and wrote these “fabley little poem paragraphs.” I have used sophisticated Google Image Search techniques to jimmy up some complements. Enjoy!
Giraffe tooth/Helmet
You pull into a nook in the alley and my helmet clunks yours and this is a kind of talk we’re having but in the talk there is a kill wish and a rocket launch and a bright laser-beam lengthening our hearts across the sidewalk end to end. There is blood and light. You pull a giraffe tooth from your pocket, center it in your palm and say have you ever seen one of these? From under my tongue I pull a giraffe tooth. I center it on my palm and say yes. We sit this way until the shadows disappear. READ MORE >
Mustaine
I mentioned Dave Mustaine yesterday on twitter jokingly and then realized today that dude just published a memoir. Shit yes. I am going to put on my fat kid clothes and read this while eating cereal.
Two little pieces
Literature is a college party: throw in enough depressed people with personality disorders, and someone is bound to get laid. At around 11PM, the bad boys enter, high on red-bull and vodka. I miss the days of Hemingway or Bukowski, where manly self-destruction came from self-hatred and happened before the photo shoot. If James Frey, per the constant middle-fingered vector of his “fuck you,” is today’s “bad boy” (sorry Bret Easton Ellis, your suit’s too good), then we have lost the battle of soul grasping. Of course, he’s just operating off of the fake memoir public image disaster — but I just worry about someone, anyone, who engages with the world, a world in which one has acquired moderate success and comfort, with such affected and insincere hostility. I find Sartre’s 1964 Nobel Prize decline a much more compelling “fuck you”; that, or a gunshot to the head. Frey will be just fine. I’d like to think, save those two little fleshy spears, he’s just reaching out for a hug.
4 all-night chemists
4. Big-ass Paris Review Jonathan Lethem interview.
I was one of those creepy dropouts who moves into his girlfriend’s dorm room. She stole meals from the dining hall in a Tupperware container hidden in a hollowed-out textbook, and I sat in her room and wrote an unpublishably bad first novel.
14. Angelina Jolie’s favorite book is Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula. If you were wondering.
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2. The Australian on Light Boxes by Shane Jones.
R.I.P. Tony Judt
The historian and critic Tony Judt died this weekend from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). He was 62. From the obituary in the Times.
An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.
[…]
“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”
There’s a wealth of links on the obit page to articles by and about Judt. I recommend “Israel without Cliches” (6/9/10). Also, here are excerpts from Judt’s most recent book, Ill Fares the Land at the NYRB and at the Times. Here’s all of Judt’s NYRB work (not sure how much is accessible without a subscription). Also check out “Bush’s Useful Idiots” from the LRB. And here’s an interview with Marc Tracy at Tablet, and another on Fresh Air about living with ALS.