5 dune ungrazed haircuts
11. Alexandra Chasin at the always glow zoran rosko vacuum player.
2. Question: Is Andy Warhol’s art on the moon?
19. Fady Joudah interview over at Willow Springs.
Nevertheless, it is just the idea that you store something you don’t want to throw away, your sense of existence—you store it and ignore it. Only when you move from that house do you check what you left in the attic and see what you want to take with you or throw away.
5. The words inside were solid, but the cover for Oxford American 2010 Best of the South sort of annoys me. Some type of Euro-model riding on the back of her adolescent brother? Is it the toy gun? The Tide clean T-shirt? Or the airbrushed/possibly perfectly placed strand of horizontal hair on her head? Something. It doesn’t click for me.
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June 8th, 2010 / 11:27 am
June 8th, 2010 / 11:27 am
It is Fry-day: Go Right Ahead
Teenagers, drunk, disheveled, excited…they ruined our party.
What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?
Like you haven’t slept in the kitchen.
And now listen now old buck old wild sunombitch don’t you get drunk today.
I’ll walk across the damn prairie by myself.
Always staying late, freeloading, shouting, foolish.
There will be no music, just dancing.
I am hightingled on the beer.
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Disorderly, lost.
Dude, don’t go halfway.
That’s being blackened, from the inside.
IF YOU AND YOUR FRIEND WRITE IN EXACTLY THE SAME VOICE ABOUT EXACTLY THE SAME MUTUAL EXPERIENCES, ARE ALL YOUR MUTUAL FRIENDS STILL OBLIGATED TO READ BOTH YOUR BOOKS?
Just wondering. (via Marshall)
It’s a bird it’s a plane
I wonder if Scribner, publishers of Don Delillo’s Underworld (1997), thought much about their cover after September 11, 2001. Delillo’s novels work high off prophetic allusions, almost desperate for dystopia, so the cover detail above showing a bird approaching the side of one of the World Trade Center towers seems like sad good luck (not to mention the twin towers in his last name). No social commentary is complete without a passive-aggressively placed Cross, a solemn mark increasing the +3000 headcount by 1. It’s all math they say, the number of copies sold, which is why massive books are not sold by the pound. To be nominated for a National Book Award is to lose, no matter how shiny the embossed sticker is. If Don tells you that at a party, you’ll know he got that from me.
These Days I Just Want To Do Something That Makes Me Feel Something: An Interview with Sasha Fletcher
To celebrate the official release of Sasha’s exciting new book, WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS (Mud Luscious Press), he and I chewed the old question/answer…but first: publisher J.A. Tyler has graciously offered to give away a free copy of the book to whomever leaves the most interesting comment in the comment box below…
HIGGS: I wonder if you’d begin by describing your process. To me, this book seems meticulously constructed: the way certain images and themes repeat and resonate, build upon each other and then collapse or disappear or mutate, the way the final passage almost seems to encapsulate all of those images and themes. Did this book come to you as an idea first or were you just thinking on paper as you went along? Did it take years or days? Did you compose it from opening to closing or did you compose it in sections and then arrange them?
FLETCHER: The book came out of several things.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
Please keep her always drunk.
I don’t do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.
I’m through with the whole works.
An unbroken night of sleep is rare.
Oh, misty-minded.
Four be the things I’d have been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
Sobriety? A basis for jokes.
Ballin in the library.
She’s probably on her way to get a bottle of bad gin.
I’m not down to my last two bits.
A deep human need to complain.
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
And down a beer.
We Are All Susceptible
On Twitter, Michael Kimball asked why zombies are so hungry. Maybe he’s doing research for a new book? Maybe it’s for
HAHAHAHAHA: READ MORE >
Meet Adam Gallari
Adam Gallari is an American ex-pat currently working on a novel and pursuing a PhD at the University of Exeter. His essays and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming from numerous outlets, including The Quarterly Conversation, Fifth Wednesday Journal, therumpus.net, TheMillions.com, anderbo.com and The MacGuffin. I recently read his muted but elegant debut short story collection, We Are Never As Beautiful We Are Now, and talked with Adam about his writing, living and studying abroad, baseball and much much more. Meet Adam Gallari.
You’re pursuing your Ph.D. in England. What compelled you to head across the Atlantic to continue your higher education? What are you studying? What’s Exeter like? Have you adopted a British accent? Is the writer’s life different in England?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with European culture and history and literature. There’s so much to explore in it, and there’s a great weight that informs it. I’ve always wanted to find a way to live either on the continent or the British Isles for a protracted period of time to be able to immerse myself in everything, and after I returned to American from Germany to get my masters I figured the first chance I had to go back there I would. A PhD seemed like the next logical step for me as far as my “career” was concerned, so I tried to combine the two and so far it’s managed to work out.
As far as the PhD, I’m pursuing it in English and currently trying to narrow down my dissertation, but at the moment it’s tending towards an exploration of the works of the Norwegian Novelist Per Petterson in the greater context of American work. His protagonists many to be both existentialist and realist at the same time; I’d compare it to Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, but I think that ultimately that’s too much of a simplification of the whole thing.