Welcome to the working weak
[from Lapham’s Quarterly] If you’re reading this at work, congratulations, you are not alone.
A Very Long—and Very Interesting—Interview with Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio
Matthew Stadler reading from his new Publication Studio published novel at Smallpressapalooza at Powell's Books.
Spotlit recently on Dennis Cooper’s blog, Portland’s Publication Studio—brainchild of novelist Matthew Stadler and his business partner Patricia No. Using print on demand equipment, PS puts out books by a number of innovative writers—including two of my favorite Seattle authors, Stacey Levine and Matt Briggs—rescues the out of print or in publication limbo, and generally advocates for a more nimble, more author-centric publishing world. I asked Matthew some questions. Matthew answered.
I wanted to know more about the machine you are using to bind the books. Could you tell me about it? Where you found it? Who had it before you? What it was used for?
Yes, we use two machines. The one that got us started, that we call Ol’ Gluey, is the heart of an old Instabook III system that was developed by a man named Victor Celario, a Mexican who started the business in Morelia and Mexico City and expanded it when he moved to Florida. Victor calls Instabook “the Mr. Coffee of portable print-on-demand.” Victor designed and patented his integrated POD system in the late 1990s, aiming for a market of self-publishing authors, the people who now use Lulu or Apple’s iBook or Blurb. The Instabook rig that we have started out at a bookshop in NewJersey in the late 1990s, performing that service (as far as I know) and then migrated to Brooklyn’s Longdash Printing, which became a printing arm of a local cafe called VoxPop. Gabriel Stuart used it there to publish more would-be self-publishers and he might have tried publishing an imprint, I’m not sure. Gabe wanted to change the focus at VoxPop and had been trying to get rid of the Instabook for a year or two when I saw his blogpost offering it at a cheap price. I flew to NYC with my ten-year old, rented a van, and drove it back to Portland last summer. We got a Kyocera FS9130DN duplex B/W printer, Ol Gluey, and an Ideal guillotine trimmer from Gabe (all parts of the Instabook III system) and started to make books in September 2009. Since then we have added a Chinese knock-off of a perfect binder, a rig you can get online for $700 – $900. We do about half the books on that and half on Ol’ Gluey. READ MORE >
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.
The Bugs Are Real
Check out the new issue of Guernica, guest edited by Brenda Wineapple, who selected three lovely essays all by women. In a collagistic tour-de-force called “Bohemian Rhapsody,” nonfiction czarista Sara Faye Lieber* reminds us that the bugs–bedbugs–are very real, and they pose a threat to nothing so much as–get this–our books. Find out why, and much else besides, in the essay.
You’ll also find out why I did not choose a close-up photo of a bedbug, and why even the one I selected is probably still an irresponsible choice, if less so.
You’ll also find out what else bedbugs can destroy.
You’ll also find out that you can’t wait to read the book that Sara is working on.
*Full disclosure: Sara is my friend. A big part of the reason I made her my friend in the first place was because she told these hilarious stories about her experience with bedbugs.
Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish
Wow. Forthcoming from OR Books. [via Clusterflock]
In literary America, to utter the name Gordon Lish in a conversation is like adding hot sauce to a meal. You either enjoy the zesty experience, one that pushes your limits or you prefer to stay away. Its Lish who, first as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname Captain Fiction) and then at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, shaped the work of many of the country’s foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah to Amy Hempel and Lily Tuck.
And as a writer himself, Lish’s stripped-down, brutally spare style earns accolades in increasing numbers. His oeuvre is coming to be recognized as among the most significant of the period that spans the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews wrote of his last collection that “Lish…is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.”
This definitive collection of Lishs short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one “Gordon Lish.” The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.
Publication April 30, 2010 546 pages
Paperback $17 Ebook $10
Paperback and ebook $22
Two Parts Rancor, One Part Joy
Guess which parts are which. But seriously--isn't this photo fucking gorgeous? Forget who it's a picture of for a second, and the fact that I found it on Gawker. Just look. Imagine it on a gallery wall. It's beautiful.
Tony O’Neill offers a pre-emptive FUCK YOU to Dr. Drew Pinsky for presumably planning to exploit the death of Corey Haim, and for being an asshole in general.
A controversial method of proselytizing to Muslims by starting with Jesus’s minor but significant role in the Koran, has generated–wait for it–controversy, drawing fire from Muslims and also some Christian groups. The procedure, naturally, is known as “The Camel Method.”
Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, loves the blazing hell out of Scott McClanahan’s Stories II.
There is a simplicity to the writing that feels very much like traditional storytelling, like a conversation, the easy way the character allows you to come into his life for a little while to hear what he wants you to hear. Despite the humor, which sneaks up on you and floors you, the stories are bleak; almost all of them are set in West Virginia and the propects for most of the characters in the stories are not good. There is sadness everywhere in these stories. And what I’m going to say next is why I think I love these stories so much. Amidst the sadness, the ways in which everyone fails each other, there is such an amazing tenderness that lifts these stories up. I felt very tightly connected to these characters and was grateful for having been around their stories…
Funny, because I was just saying something similar to fellow-Giant Amy McDaniel over gchat yesterday morning (she’s a fan too). I said that McClanahan’s book reminded me of the subtly acerbic, realist-ish Richard Brautigan not of the novels but of the short stories, like say “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” crossbred with the big-hearted schlubbery of the Larry Brown of “Big Bad Love.” McClanahan seems like the kind of guy who probably read Breece D’J Pancake and came away thinking, “yeah, okay, true, but dude–take a load off.” No kidding. That said, it must be admitted that McClanahan’s lightness can occasionally, like Brautigan again, bleed into slightness, but if the worst thing you can say about a writer is that his not-bogging-you-down occasionally manifests as it-floats-off-on-the-breeze, he and his book are still in pretty fine shape. Anyway, the upshot is that we are all very much charmed/impressed/pleased by Scott McClanahan, and you should see if maybe you are too.
It’s worth noting, by the by, that this is not Giant’s first time delighting in Scott McClanahan. Back in January, Sam Pink reviewed Stories II. That post also conatins a story from the book, “The Couple,” which I think is exemplary and swell. And back last June, pr enthused about the original, Stories. And Scott’s own site is here.
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March 14th, 2010 / 11:42 am
March 14th, 2010 / 11:42 am
NLW (6): Dimension x7y Giga Heart Maggot
Today’s Natalie Lyalin Week bon bon is a guest post from Erin McNellis, who wrote this terrific review of Natalie Lyalin’s Pink and Hot Pink Habitat for NOÖ Journal [11]. Animals abound!
You studied ecology in seventh grade, memorizing the biomes for your science test: the chaparral, the rainforest, the tundra. You learned about the delicate balance of life, you imagined yourself into each exotic environment from your cold, smooth desk under the fluorescent lights—but you never imagined any place quite like Natalie Lyalin’s Pink and Hot Pink Habitat.
A Little More Hannah: A remembrance by a former student, plus a BH essay you may never have seen before
In December 2005, my friend Adam got obsessed with Jenny Lewis and bought every magazine at the Borders with her face on the cover, which was a LOT of them. Among the plenitude of mostly miserable and intellect-proof “music magazines,” which I soon found myself flipping through in mild amusement/dismay, one thing caught my eye: an essay on Beckett and Christianity by Barry Hannah in a magazine called Paste, which I had never heard of before. I was so enraptured with this essay that I made it my business to track their books editor down, and indeed my gmail records reflect that by 01/05/06 I was bugging Charles McNair, author of the novel Land O’ Goshen and editor of the Paste books page, for attention and work. Charles has been a good friend and occasional employer of mine ever since, and it all stems from our shared love of Barry Hannah. As it turns out, Charles studied with Hannah at the MFA program in Tuscaloosa, back when–but let me not tell his story for him. He has a very fine remembrance of his old teacher up at the Paste site, which you should go read. And also, Paste has gone ahead and made available Hannah’s essay, “The Maddening Protagonist.”
I’ve studied the mystic poet William Blake a good long while. Blake’s prophetic books—driven by a man who saw angels in trees and advocated naked free love—I can’t read except as inspired lunacy, which would also hold true for other denominational texts discounted by every theological archaeologist without rabid wolves running around his head. But where do you stop the discounting? We’re only cursing the darkness from the position of our own predilections when it comes to religion and, even more difficult, faith.
For simple truthful laymen, the Holy Bible is inconsistent to an almost sickening degree, and we mainly just let it pass. Faulkner once commented about one of his male characters who, “like most men, never thought about God one way or another.” Through the ages there seems a redundancy of the outright mad clutching Bibles to their chests and spouting scripture incoherently as they proceed from one asylum to the next.
NLW(5): Making Séance of Natalie Lyalin’s “Get Out Of Here, Ghost” (Guest Post by Seth Parker)
PINK AND HOT PINK HABITAT
Thursday and Friday are Sethdays in Natalie Lyalin Week. Today we have poet and frozen vegetable czar Seth Parker, editor of SKEIN, serving up his prophetic ghost vision of Natalie’s poetry. Plus, Seth reminds us: You can buy Natalie Lyalin’s first book of poems, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books) now. Check out her unbelievable journal, GlitterPony, online, and see her read her work at Divine Magnet.
GET OUT OF HERE, GHOST
All these days were real. Before hunting season
we met on the courts, in manicured gardens,
next to man-made water. This whole time I
was deep sleeping. I was packing the dirt in
and being happy. Looking inside a python I saw
two tracts of digestion. Outside. Outside is
an obvious danger. Gun and killer kind. At
night they come in and we battle them back
out. Get out of here. Get going with your
pitchforks. In wedding season we talk
colors. We talk delicate and scalloped.
How it is only human to have the fontanel.
Yes, make an ancient signal to carry over
all the side of the ocean. If no, send creepy
letters to your most annoying friends. Be
a mistress, or a lost sister coming back.
Go Right Ahead: It is Friday
I drink because it’s the only time I can stand it.
I am as tall as a shotgun and just as nosy.
[JW: Can we have a drink?
TC: Oh, we will!]
I can walk soberly while drunk.
The way a cottonmouth rears up…
This huge female bouncer threw me into the street!
Why not remove restrictions and let the people drink good whiskey?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We want two more double margaritas, and I want some ice in my drink, and I want a straight jigger of just pure tequila.
Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.
But I seem to be off the track again.