Michael Kimball, Postcard Genius et al
If you haven’t heard by now, Michael Kimball, who I also like to think of as a genie who broke through his own bottle, was recently inducted into the Guinness Book for International King of Postcards.
Over the past few months, Kimball has been working on a series of postcards in which, after speaking to his subject for a while, he condenses their life story into a text small enough to fit on the back of a postcard. Then he mails them the postcard. It’s a pretty peculiar experience, to receive this little piece of paper that encapsulates you into these amazing microwords, lanced by Kimball’s stellar, steady eye. Me, I can’t even draw a decent sketch of a dude’s head.
The results, besides being in the mail, have been cataloged online at his postcard life stories blog. Among others, you can read, in less than a couple minutes, the lives of folks like Kim Chinquee, Adam Robinson, Myfanwy Collins, Josh Maday, Jen Michalski, and a wide range of people from out of nowhere. The scope of the thing is just kind of flabbergasting: Kimball as a filter for all these people’s years. I can’t imagine anyone else capable of such an undertaking.
Oh, and besides all that, he just so happens to have also published one of the hottest, most innovative books of the year.
Jesse Ball has retired to the country
Author websites that are not blogs are often a much maligned thing: people get these things built and don’t know a lot about html or don’t really know what to do with their page other than update when they get a new thing in a magazine. For the most part the author website is a consistently boring venture.
Jesse Ball, on the other hand, seems to always be a little bit further out there. Jesse’s website, affectionately titled ‘Jesse Ball was a SPY, but has retired to the country,’ is cryptically arranged and full of all kinds of weird literary and visual projects, which seem to span the long hidden career of the author of SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS, among other things.
You could probably spend quite a while clicking around amongst the layerings here, as depending on how you approach different pages of the site, the offerings seem to vary. Among the more interesting things, outside the weird artworks and art projects, are the nested series of all of Ball’s past manuscripts, which he has kept compiled and archived here, with various amounts available to be read by the willing web traveler. The negotiation of the site itself seems to change sporadically also: depending on when you arrive, you may find all sorts of other things. For instance, when I arrived just now to cull more examples of things to talk about, I got caught in a picture loop promoting Ball’s new forthcoming book.
So let’s say this: Ball’s new novel, THE WAY THROUGH DOORS, is coming out in early 2009 from Vintage, which I for one am quite excited about.
DANIEL BAILEY CONTINUES TO RULE AND BE A TOTALLY HOT DUDE
yesterday i looked at daniel bailey’s blog. you may know daniel bailey as the most up and coming internet poet/totally hot dude on the web. on his blog he said he had finished a collection of poems. so i was like, “prove it man”. he then sent me the collection. it is called EAST CENTRAL INDIANA. i read it. it fucking rules. it rules like when you do a really good job coloring a page in a coloring book. it rules like when you think there is no more pudding in your fridge and then you move aside an old thing of jelly and there is another pudding cup. it rules like when you find a nest of baby birds and the mom isn’t there and you push a fast food straw into each of the baby bird’s skulls and blow air into their skulls until they expand and burst. here is a quote from EAST CENTRAL INDIANA:
“you looked
at the boney gravel as you said it and then you laid down
and made a bone angel and said, ‘it’s finally starting
to feel like winter is over.’ i said, ‘yeah’
and then i looked up at the sky and it wasn’t there“
The Art of…
I guess I could preface this recommendation with a short essay on whether or not a person can learn to be a writer. I guess I could.
I won’t, though. Not now. Not in the mood.
I don’t, though, have a lot of interest in books on how to write. Not usually. Not many. Gardner’s book, sure. Some of Kundera’s essays. Some of Nabokov’s lectures. Borges’. Barthelme’s. Calvino’s.
And one more: Charles Baxter. Both Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext have been invaluable to me. Not in that his books offer blueprints, or prescriptive advice. Baxter just thinks about his writing, and the writing of others, in really interesting ways. And reading an essay that he has written about one aspect of, say, Chekhov’s writing, invariably does the triple duty of not simply making you see an element in Chekhov’s writing in a new way, or getting you to find similar tactics in the writing of others, but his work rearranges the way you read, rearranges your brain, and you start finding new and interesting things that have nothing to do with Baxter’s essays whenever you read.
That’s what I’ve noticed, anyway.
He’s editing a series called The Art of…for Graywolf Press. His book is pretty damn good.
Checking In On Jason Bredle
Pain Fantasy by Jason Bredle is one of the most enjoyable books of poetry I’ve read this year. Strange, funny, dark, heartbreaking, mixing in sports and wordplay (yes, sports), there was a lot to like about this collection. Bredle has also been hitting the online journals – most recently three solid pieces in the latest issue of No Posit.
Some writers you just want to know what they are working on. At least I have a list in my head like this. I emailed Jason Bredle and asked him to talk a little about what he’s working on. What follows is the response I got:
Basically I decided to divide up all my poems from the past two years and make two chapbooks out of them, but I haven’t even made the chapbooks, and I don’t know how to get them published even if I do make them. I’m thinking maybe instead I’ll let them fall in love with each other and make a baby. I don’t think this is really newsworthy, though. I thought I was going to finish a manuscript in June and I put all this time into revising and reordering poems and then I went to LA and decided while I was there that I was going to scrap the whole thing, so I came home and rewrote a lot of things all over again. Did you ever see Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story? It’s very much like the part where John C. Reilly is doing all this acid and working on the same song for six months. I didn’t love that movie as much as I’d hoped I would, but it was worth seeing just for that scene. I’ve only written two poems in the past three months. One I wrote a week before I was hospitalized, and then I was sick for a little while, and then I wrote another, and then I started working a lot of extra hours and haven’t had time to sit down and write, or when I do I go back to this poem called Caspian Sea, which is essentially a blank page I spend hours looking at with Caspian Sea written at the top.
I also asked who he was reading, what writers he likes:
Mark Halliday has a new book out, which I’m reading. He’s my favorite poet. I was going to try to find this one particular poem of his on the internet and send it to a friend of mine so if I can find it I’ll also send it to you. Okay, I just looked around and I couldn’t find it, but it doesn’t help that I don’t really remember the title.
For those who haven’t read Jason Bredle, I suggest doing a google search and picking up his books.
Brandi Wells is a dream person
There’s a new issue of THE DREAM PEOPLE now live, I like the Dream People, it is a surrealist/absurdist journal that’s been kicking for quite some time now, run by the good man D. Harlan Wilson. It seems there aren’t enough surreal-related venues out there by far and often when places claim surrealism they mean ‘goofy,’ but The Dream People seems to be on point with the view, and at the very least is a great read, all -isms aside.
I particularly enjoyed in this issue, Brandi Wells’s BABY. Brandi Wells has been doing a lot of interesting work lately, publishing weird, tight and image-ripping short things all around, I really like what she’s got her hands in. She also seems to be able to write about ridiculous things in a way that makes them seem sensible, which is harder than making sensible things ridiculous.
Lines like this: “She followed me to the bathroom and watched me piss, told me I wasn’t pissing right and I ought to piss better if I was going to be a mother.”
I want a Brandi Wells novel.
open letter to the troll on tao lin’s blog
Dear when.parents.flee.the.country,
I don’t usually get involved in blog-related confrontations, for what I assume are obvious (though, perhaps, not to you) reasons. You are hardly the first troll/weirdo that Tao Lin has had to deal with, and I am sure you won’t be the last. That fact of Tao’s life has little–if anything–to do with me, other than that it makes me sad for him sometimes (also exhausted and pissed off on his behalf) but this isn’t why I’m writing today.
Agriculture Reader #2 was edited by my good friend–the magazine’s founder–Jeremy Schmall. I have some poems in it, and soon after that issue came out I moved to my present position as its co-editor. (Our next issue will come out in February 2009.) You probably noticed that the AGR is a handmade journal with a prominent design element. Its entire print run is somewhere in the low to mid three figures. We hope, therefore, that every copy we sell or give away will be cherished.
Your utter lack of civility, displayed repeatedly over the past few days in the comments section of Tao’s blog–including but not limited to stalkerish language and intimations of violence, compounded by the cowardice of your refusing to reveal your identity–makes me doubt your capacity to appreciate art in general, and the AGR in particular.
It grieves me that Agriculture Reader #2 may not be bringing you the joy you had hoped it would, but my greater concern is that you are not the sort of reader we are looking for. The AGR is a finite resource, every copy of it is precious, and I hate to think of even one copy being wasted. I hope you will consider returning your copy of the magazine, so I can give it to someone who can appreciate it. (Note that I do not say “will.” We do not require our readers to provide a guarantee of validation or an echo chamber of praise; but we confess to a bias for those with the capacity for comprehension and, if need be, civil discussion.)
Please contact me in the comments section of this post regarding my offer. We can exchange mailing addresses, or perhaps agree to meet at some neutral location. In exchange for your remittance of the magazine (undamaged, and with the included audio CD), I will bring you several paperbacks from the thrift store near my house. In a best case scenario these will be Tom Clancy’s Op-Center(TM) novels written by someone other than Tom Clancy, or perhaps some entries in the R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series.
Yours,
Justin
THE NEW BLURRY PHOTOGRAPH
It may have started, as many internet-lit things seem to do, with Tao Lin. His drawings of weird animals rendered from Microsoft Paint are endearing and comical. That the Adobe platform (illustrator/photoshop/indesign) is not employed is what I call ‘guerrilla pixel-dom’—crude, design-unfriendly, kitschy in a Bill Gates kinda way. Such aesthetic seems to be propagating. Enter Mike Bushnell and our own Sam Pink.
Mr. Pink, sans Reservoir Dogs, is, um, an interesting character. He brings us an adolescent violence that, constrained in its virtual medium, is benign and somehow charming. Looking at this blog, I don’t know whether to become aroused or duct tape my penis to my perineum for safety.
Mr. Bushnell, of face warpaint fame, is, um, an interesting character. His drawings of anthropomorphic creatures, while not necessarily violent, are of vehement temperament. Yes, Jean-Michel Basquiat tread such ground in the 80’s, but in oils.
Just what are these guys saying? Tao Lin, a master of quick-witted sayings that evoke complex existential quandaries, brings us ‘sad pterodactyl living a life of fear and anxiety’ and ‘elderly obese frost bitten squirrel’, among many others.
Pink and Bushnell’s drawings seem reactionary, void of the deep—yet somehow self-effacing—sadness that is Tao Lin. Maybe they are on to something different, and the comparison is unfair. I’m humored by all three gentlemen, all whom make me want to duct tape my penis to my perineum for safety. (For Tao, I’d use organic hemp tape.)
When one saw a blurry black-and-white photograph, one knew poetry was coming. Every journal had some BW photo of some chick’s shoulder up close, or some tree’s shadow. Blurry photo meant poetry.
Now, for some, a fucked up MS paint drawing means poetry. Are we cruder? younger? of binary soul? or just bored?
While supplies last.
i am being honest
I recently read Matthew Savoca’s, i am being honest, over at bearcreekfeed. I’ve been enamoured with this site since its first story by Kim Chinquee. Editor Colin Bassett has yet to leave me feeling anything but happily morose and disheartened.
i am being honest has this tender sensibility about domestic life, but it’s still very dour and a little sad. It reminded me of small pale humans, by daniel spinks. They both have this way of displaying the repetitive quality of relationships that is comforting but ultimately depressing as hell. I would like to marry either of these writers, but after reading their lovely work, it suddenly seems like a bad idea.
Here is Matthew reading the last (and my favorite) poem of the book. He talks in a funny voice, and I like it.
Everyone Love
NOÖ Journal’s blog is launching a new project called NOÖ Loves Everyone. They* intend to interview everyone who has ever contributed to NOÖ Journal ever and post these interviews on the blog. The order is alphabetical by first name. First up is Alex Burford, co-editor of Pinch Pinch Press. Next up will be acclaimed poet Arlene Ang.
*Full disclosure: when I say they, I mean Ryan and me; both of us write for this site too.