October Hobart
The new Hobart is up today, and it includes some fantastic pieces of fiction. But, as my gig over there is as interviews editor, I thought I might point to the two fine interviews available.
Amy Minton—one of my go-to interviewers—talks to Molly Gaudry about her novella We Take Me Apart.
But my ultimate white whale is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children — not because I can’t get through it, but because it’s so incredible (I had to read it for a postmodernism course, a course on diasporic traditions, a contemporary fiction course, the list goes on). That book, I feel, is so important, necessary. I want to do that, but in a different way.
Also, I had a short conversation with Patrick DeWitt about his amazing, amazing novel Ablutions. If you haven’t read Ablutions, do so very soon.
Sean Lovelace Is the Server Working Now
I think Sean Lovelace’s blog is hilarious and always spot on. His writing there makes me not hate runners as much. Like when he did the airforce marathon, I thought that was a fascinating and rugged bit of literary essay.
I also think he thinks that how a thing is said matters more than what that said thing is. That’s a smart rule, a top ten rule, one that can’t be made too elastic. I mean, really, I don’t know him at all so there’s not much reason for me to care about his running habits, impressive though they are, or his disc golf hobby, whatever that is, or how much he likes hot dogs and thinks they are the greatest food on the planteen. But since, blogwise, he often opts to invent a phrase like “hang something all oyster” rather than to further explain a point that is (maybe) clear enough or (maybe) less valuable than the vim of the saying or (maybe) whatever — since that — then I’m piqued and I have a reason to care about all the else, the running and deer hunting and whatever hippy hobby he has.
He can’t, thank heavens, go a blog-sentence without ending awonk. A paragraph like this gives the reader a lot of credit and gives him the opportunity to use language like paint:
. . . I ate my pre-race meal, a mixture of liquids and gels and potato chips and solvents and Near Beer and oil additives. My body felt like a Global Hawk. My stomach did the cloud-cover, the sandstorm. I then descended into the arms of Morpheus.
That excerpt starts with lucid detail then crashes another party. This is the reading eye I brought to his chapbook, How Some People Like Their Eggs, fresh from the Rose Metal Press skillet. How does it measure up?
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September 30th, 2009 / 3:24 am
September 30th, 2009 / 3:24 am
Tao Lin Reading + Q&A + Minireview
Tao Lin reads from the first section of Shoplifting from American Apparel, then answers questions about writing process, influence, shoplifting, etc.
I read and greatly enjoyed this novella a couple weeks ago. It makes some interesting use of what people who want to put tags on things could call verbal minimalism inherting cinéma vérité, as well as a mash of Andys (Warhol and Kaufman), new uses of internet language in print, and a linear-alinear timeline modeling that more correctly models everyday life than most textual attempts at representing everyday life. That’s if you want to put tags on things.
I’d prefer to just say that I laughed more at parts of this book than I’ve laughed in a long time, and I think those who see this book as ‘incomplete’ might be missing part of the point here, which is not to exploit the expectations of Tao Lin’s previous work while also not exploit some kind of forced shifting of an artist’s tone. Like many artists who are ahead of the curve, this book is ahead of a curve that you might not yet see curving, particularly because it most succeeds on the level of entertaining the reader while being ahead of the curve, which then most easily becomes mistaken as unfocused, when in fact it is the extreme opposite: focused beyond focus.
I really enjoyed this book.
You can buy it here.
Breaking stuff.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqxwXopbdRg
Blake’s remix contest—which celebrates the beauty of taking something nice and fucking it up—results are in. The winner of the contest was Krammer Abrahams.
Couple of Giants made it in, too. Chris Higgs did a erasure of the whole book, which I skimmed through and loved the results of. Catherine is in there, too. I have a little thing—anagrams of the first few paragraphs of the story in question, “Tour of a Drowned Neighborhood”—also.
Lots of other friends, commentators, and relations. Two pieces by Brian Evenson, too! It’s Scrotal Cash. Download it here.
The ghostly cu-cu
Kristin Naca’s first poetry collection Bird Eating Bird, winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series mtvU prize as chosen by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa, is now available!
Here is a sample, from part of a part of a poem called “House,” which appears in Octopus 11:
“Suppose there is a bubble that flutters inside you. Or suppose it builds in the plastic air. Or the plastic that is liquid and luminous yet air. Or suppose in reverse the air plastic. And in its sloshing to-and-fro forms teacups of air unsettling its layers. In the teacups is air air not plastic. And teacups are cool and porcelain as anything that’s cool and porcelain.”
GIANT EXCERPT: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#1)
Arriving In Your New Country
Wrong decisions are harder to make than most
people realize, tears flying sideways in a gale.
We swerve in the road so as not to hit dead things,
but I used to know someone who did the opposite.
He liked to drive through them. Stars are most
serious when seen from the back of a pickup truck
while very very drunk, and if someone kisses you
there it doesn’t count. I would grab your sadness
as a movie monster would, bring it to the harshest
part of the mountain: I haven’t seen this place yet
but I am told weeping is not part of its economy
and everything there is delicious if eaten alone.
All this week, HTMLGiant will be posting poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Check back daily for fresh doses.
“In my wife’s arms, it behaved like a live mouse in water.”
Here in Massachusetts, where it’s raining a little on the chimneys, you get to thinking about Puritanism and grimly mowing the lawn, keeping yourself right in the eyes of Judgment, which is not so much a single set of floating eyes or even many sets of eyes but a vast eye-mucus gum, that sticky feeling of making one decision after another, freighted decisions, handled clumsy, bound for worry, leaving you fraught over past transgressions and mowing the lawn in the rain.
To feel better, you might want to read “Tied to Us” by John Maradik, American Short Fiction‘s web pinup for September. Maradik’s story is about the tension between inevitability and style. It opens by saying “She was an excellent kisser so we couldn’t help but have a baby.” That baby puts its foot in duck fountains and has a face like a zipper. Yards look outer-spacey. Necks pop like bullwhips. We might do well to mention Leonard Michaels or web-favorite Daniel Spinks. But Maradik’s story is also gooey and twitchy in a way that’s very much its own. Its got its own shoulders tensed at a very strange angle, which makes me want to tell you about it. It’s a good story. It’s a big lawn.
(my) Zak Smith interview at The Faster Times
From the intro (click through for the full piece):
Who wants to be pissed off and terrified for the next half hour?
Dave Neiwert , the award-winning journalist and managing editor of Crooks & Liars–one of my favorite blogs–discusses his book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etoyumdyRS4&
Luca Dipierro animates Lydia Millet
Second in the line of video trailers for short stories from Electric Literature (the first having been for Jim Shepard, mentioned here) is a stop motion animation from the wonderful Luca Dipierro, who took a single sentence from Lydia Millet’s story to create this one minute reel of beauty.
Here is the sentence: “Sometimes he wished he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them.” from her story Sir Henry.