If you haven’t caught Tao Lin on twitter since his declaration of “no longer trying” during the last ~48 hours, it’s been pretty fun/funny/interesting. Besides watching his unflagging dedication to the whim during the migration of hundreds of followers following the often several times a minute posts re: boredom, racism, music, being unfollowed, retweets forming a “Best American Tweets” anthology (during which I received ~45 notification emails), I think my favorite part so far was when he had “cybersex” with some dude from some band. It’s all getting deleted June 1st. Have you been watching?

Ken Sparling is a writer. He works in a library in Toronto. He has written six novels. His latest is Intention, Implication, Wind from Pedlar Press. His first, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, published by Knopf in 1996 will be reissued by Mud Luscious Press in August.

Not a stranger to making his books by hand (he handmade his second novel), his latest project, The Serial Library, involves taking old hardback books, ripping some pages out and pasting new test in along with old photographs and artwork. There are ten handmade books in The Serial Library and they are loaned out to people in such locations as Montreal, Calgary, Brooklyn, and Pennsylvania. The book I took out of The Serial Library was a one of kind—more than one of a kind. It was the only one—made from Dennis Cooper’s hardcover Try. The Last Time I Saw the Wind continues Sparling’s experimental narratives. There is a prince who likes to have affairs, but he eventually focuses on one woman. At the same time a first person narrator tells seemingly unrelated anecdotes from his life, including queries on love and touch, a portrait of a hot dog man, and such short fizzles as the following: “When I say I feel like I’ve been lucky, I mean to say that I didn’t get what I wanted out of life. Not ever. That was pretty lucky.”

Ken had this to say about the process:

There’s only going to be one of each book, but I’m going to keep making them. I’m treating this like performance, as opposed to composition. As in jazz, the performance is never the same as the original composition. So I have a manuscript that I was originally going to try to get into shape to submit to my publisher. That’s the composition. It’s about 100,000 words at the moment. Each performance involves selecting a book to deface, finding pictures, gluing them in, selecting text, revising and adding as I go (improvisation), formatting the text, then printing, ripping or cutting, then gluing. I select the pictures and text as I go, never jumping ahead more than a page or two. I also remove pages from the original book to keep the new book from getting too fat.

To maintain its essence as performance, the book has to change hands regularly; otherwise it just becomes another object on someone’s shelf. If it truly is a performance, then it can only realize its full potential in the hands of a new witness/reader. Thus the serial library.

I’ve slowed down in terms of making the books, but I do a bit of work almost every day. For sure I do a bit of writing every day, and often a bit of book construction. It’s very much improvisational, based on texture and rhythm and the music of the language, but also trying to see how much language can really say about anything, wondering about that. I’ve never felt so calm and unconcerned about anything I wrote. I think it’s because I know I’ll be making something new tomorrow and there’s no wall to run up against, no place where what I write turns to stone the way a manuscript eventually does when you funnel all your efforts toward making a book that will be mass produced.

***

GG: Can you tell me about the images used. Where did you get them? In the book I read, I noticed many incredible shots, including stunning photos of groups of people taken from a bird’s eye view.

KEN: I get the images for the serial library books from magazines and books that I mostly buy in Book Ends, which is a bookstore at the library run by the Friends of the Library. They sell stuff pretty cheap. I like books of photography or fine art books with reproductions, and also old magazines if I can get them, like National Geographic or Life. It’s fun going up to the store every once in a while and browsing. I bought a lot of National Geographics from Book Ends a while back.

When I’m making the books, I pick the images that capture me. I seem to be drawn to black and white images, or nearly black and white images. I have a couple great old Life magazines with some images that I really love, but have yet to find a place in the books because the images in

Life are so big and I’m hesitant to crop them. I like to tear, not cut, the images out of books, but I’ll use scissors sometimes if it makes sense.

GG: There is a high degree of sensuality in the book The Last Time I Saw the Wind: “The hot smell of her shadows touched my face and warmed my face and something in my stomach warmed and sometimes my chin would brush her shoulder. The girl kept her eyes closed and her head tipped back and I could feel the warmth coming off her skin.”

This section is opposite a page with two photographs. In one, a small, pale blond haired child holds a sea-shell to her ear, and in the other a horse stands tall in the mud over a man who is bent before him. In the background is a mountain. Many things can be drawn from the interplay of text and image here. What, if anything, governs your choices in making the books?

KEN: Whatever governs my choices in creating the books is very visual, very intuitive. I select pictures I like, pictures that move me. The system has everything to do with the logistics of giving the pictures I am moved by a place that does them justice, visually, in the book. It comes down to finding a space that can accommodate them…even just in terms of the size of the pictures, or how much I can get away with cropping without diminishing the power of the image. I love finding an image that has another image on the back and I can use both images in the book. Or coming across a blank page in the book (between chapters, or whatever) that I can utilize somehow.

I don’t ever select a picture based on text on a facing page. Although I’ll often place the blank back of a text page next to an image where I want the image to stand alone, with no text opposite it.

GG: I’ve read a number of your books and a most have a fragmented narrative. A story will begin and then another story will start, then another. Sometimes you come back to these stories, sometimes not. What draws you to this style of writing?

KEN: Do you know Brad Mahldau, the pianist? I just read an essay he wrote about the balance between composition and improvisation, and in it he talks about the compositions of Thelonious Monk, saying: “Indeed, we almost need another name than melody here; it is more like the remaining broken shards of a melody that once existed.”

You talk about a fragmented narrative in my writing, but I’d like to think of another name than narrative here. Maybe what you call a fragmented narrative is less a series of broken narrative shards, more a kind of straining toward narrative, in the same way we strain to make of our lives a thread that leads us somewhere we like to imagine ourselves eventually arriving.

A jazz tune generally starts with a composed melody, the head, and then the players riff over the harmonic structure that underlies the head. There’s no composed head in the serial library books. But I hope the writing in the serial library books seems to refer to a kind of structure that you could understand in terms of narrative. That underlying structure might just be my life up to now, or my writing up to the brink of the serial library. So that now my writing has become one unbroken improvisation, and each book in the serial library is a continuation of my improvising on the same tune I’ve been improvising on all along. The fact that there are a bunch of discrete entities in the serial library is akin to the fact that the day comes to an end. Yes, each book in the serial library is a fixed entity enclosed in a cover, so it seems that each of the books comes to an end, but from my perspective, there’s no break, no beginning, no end, I just keep carrying on with the improvisation, which is why, I think, this is turning out to be so supremely satisfying. I’m not thinking in terms of a project, or any kind of end. There is just this ongoing improvisation using language that I do each morning for ten or twenty minutes, and on the weekends for a little longer sometimes, and sometimes after work (but mostly I’m just too exhausted at the end of the day) or in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, which is more nights than not these days.

Here’s something else Mahldau says: “Monk was onto something else, though, and it involves the actual development of themes during his solo. By development, I mean that the musical content unfolds with a narrative logic; each idea springs from the previous one… The way in which this organic development continues during Monk’s solo suggests that when a song has a deeply embedded architecture like that of “I Mean You,” it will lend itself to formally richer solos, but only if the soloist is aware of the architecture and wishes to comment on it.”
With literature, maybe you could think of the reader as the soloist. To the extent that the reader is aware of the architecture of what I’m doing and wishes to comment on it, that reader will have a richer reading experience, the way a soloist will have a richer experience if he understands what Monk was doing and has a hunger to comment or respond.

“Monk set the bar for an approach to improvisation in which form itself becomes an expressive means.”

The form I’ve chosen, this straining toward narrative, I hope will become for the reader an expressive means that underlies and complements the content of what I write.

via Biblioklept

5.

I just put in my fucking laundry. I put everything together in one load. There was a girl next to me. She came across the place, put her clothes next to my clothes. I kind of wanted to giver her my business card,  I had nothing interesting to say. She was a typical dreamgirl.

This was a weekend without work. There was like, some kind of creative planning committee document. It needed revisions. I couldn’t tear myself away from the laundry.

Outside of my first-floor condo, I smoke, and drink coffee from a white cup. I’m sitting on a ledge next to the garbage cans, listening to ranchero music. A guy is washing his maroon Ford Windstar. He looks happy, probably a family dude taking a break from the family to meet Bushwick on a Sunday morning.

Up and down the street, people are coming out of their apartments. I go back into the laundromat and move my clothes to the dryer.

***

In this Latin neighborhood, I’m just another corporate officer. A craftsmen working at the core and living on the periphery. There are a few of us here, at the city’s edge. We have secret cash and somewhere to go during the day. We move between worlds that don’t exist in reality. I’m like – having a meeting inside of the idea of a meeting. Where the light is soft. The furniture is expensive because that is what our clients expect. They are reasonable people, our clients. It’s hard to spot someone who is totally devoted to moving money between dream A and dream B. It’s like trying to see air. You could discover a conspiracy for good, and then tell nobody of it. The executives exist by organizing a corporate fantasy in space and time. They are different when the neighborhood is different. They disappear into cars, melt into nameless coffee shops and production studios. They are the anonymous clientele of the finest establishments.

I’m trying to remember the last time there was something I needed to buy that I couldn’t afford. It was probably at University.

I trying to remember wanting something I couldn’t have.

My CEOs are so approachable. The Vice President of Culture and Communication says “hey,” near the elevator bank for floors 12-24. I imagine that maybe they live at the top of my condo, deep in Queens. We have these post-neighborhood living situations. We all have these projectors in our Great Rooms. Because money doesn’t mean everything it used to mean. It’s simpler now. It doesn’t take an intense tradition. It doesn’t require a coat of arms. It’s like tap water and being really friendly and never loosing focus on what matters most to America.

It’s time to buy in.

This letter just came from the NEA to a BlazeVOX author:

Dear XXX:

It has come to our attention that BlazeVOX books has asked authors to contribute to the cost of publishing their own books.

The eligibility requirements for the NEA’s Creative Writing Fellowships prohibit applicants from using publications from presses that require individual writers to pay for part or all of the publication costs (http://www.arts.gov/grants/apply/Lit/eligibility.html).

Therefore, you may not use a book published BlazeVOX book to establish your eligibility.  You have until 4:00 p.m. (Eastern) on Friday, March 9, 2012 to establish your eligibility for the fellowships using alternate publications.  Please email your new Summary of Applicant Publications to me at bergerb@arts.gov by the deadline.  Any applicant failing to meet this deadline will be deemed ineligible for the fellowships.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Best,

B— B—

Division Specialist| Literature Division

National Endowment for the Arts

1100 Pennsylvania Ave., NW | Rm. 703 | Washington, DC 20506

202.682.5757 | 202.682.5481 FAX |bergerb@arts.gov

What do you think? Is the NEA right or wrong? Should a writer be “punished” just because they had their first book published by BlazeVOX?

1. A gender breakdown of articles and stories submitted & pitched to magazines. In my experience with slush piles, they can be quite male-heavy and I’ve heard the same from editors.

2. A gender breakdown of books submitted to agents and publishers. (See above)

3. A breakdown of how many books written by men are marketed as “literary” or serious works versus how many by women are marketed as such. This, I think, is the one of the biggest and harder to tackle problems. Books written by women get a picture of a bare shoulder or a pair of legs on it and then men don’t buy it and “serious” reviewers don’t want to review it. Pretty simple. Pretty much a bummer.

4. A gender breakdown of how many male writers are solicited by these magazines. Because, you know, your short story probably isn’t going to make it out of the The New Yorker slush pile. It just isn’t. We know the major magazines (hell, even a lot of the smaller ones) are made almost exclusively out of solicited material. We know that. And because of the same problems that the VIDA numbers point out each year, editors know less women they want to solicit.  So, yeah, it’s a vicious cycle, blah blah blah, but one thing you can do about it is be a woman and work hard and submit everywhere until you cannot be ignored.

You can try to tell me these two bros don’t share blood, but I won’t believe you.

Lauren Spohrer, associate editor of NOON, has just launched Two Serious Ladies which has Diana Hamilton and Catherine Lacey (or Roxane Gay and Heidi Julavits), for example.

Rachel B. Glaser was the first to tell me about Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies; the first thing I read in Lauren Spohrer’s Two Serious Ladies was by Lesley Yalen. Today’s Lesley’s birthday and tonight Rachel and Lauren Spohrer and Lawrence Giffin and Diane Williams are going to read at Flying Object. You should arrive sharply at 8.

Lauren Spohrer wrote Happy Birthday and Natalie Lyalin published it. That’s serious.  I’ve never met Lauren Spohrer but she’ll be here any minute I just met Lauren Spohrer and Lawrence Giffin who wrote “It is now 01:23:34 AM on October 28, 2011.” in Ex Tempore (Troll Thread)

Lauren Spohrer and Lawrence Giffin wrote a dos-a-dos chapbook from Agnes Fox Press, Just Kids. It’s just out but it just won the National Book Award. Here are two serious pictures of Lesley Yalen holding Just Kids, and one just kids one:

I’m a huge fan of Icelander. It’s one of my favorite books. I remember reading it and kind of feeling my own writing open up to new things – maybe it was the playfulness, the energy in Icelander, that broke things open. I’d like to think so. Then last week I was thinking, what happened to Dustin Long? Where is a new book? So, what’s up? Everything okay?

Thanks again for the kind words about Icelander. The short answer about what happened to me is “grad school.” I’m currently ABD, with a dissertation in the works about the “rise of the graphic novel” and its parallels to the 18th-Century “rise of the novel.” We’ll see how that goes. New novels are, I hope, on the way, though. I took way too long writing the follow-up to Icelander, which is a sort of absurd historical novel about a Spanish Jesuit priest in 17th-Century China. Research (including a few years learning Mandarin) took a lot longer than I thought it would, but I finished it not long ago and hope to sell it soon. And after I completed that one, I decided that my next book should require no research at all, so I quickly banged out a novel set (temporally) in modern times and (geographically) only in cities where I’ve lived. I just finished revising that one last week, and I’m pretty excited about it. There was some personal tumult along the way, but nothing that has kept me long from writing.

That’s good news – two new books are done. Why are you waiting to send them out? I think this interview may be a series “What happened to this debut novelist I really liked?” Or something like that. I imagined you might be in school or just got an office job and said fuck writing.

I’m not waiting anymore. The China book (Pavilion) took a long time, and I just finished revising the other (Bad Teeth), but with any luck both will be out there somewhere in the next year or so. For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’d ever say fuck writing. I find it hard to stop one book without starting another. I think I actually dragged out the revisions on Bad Teeth until I had a start on the one I’m working on now.

Do you want my prediction? I think with every debut novelist I’ll predict what will happen to them after they tell me what’s up. For you, I have some good news and some bad news.

Ha, okay. Hit me.

The good news is that Bad Teeth is going to get accepted at a major press and receive some solid reviews (including a very positive review in the New York Times). People are really going to like that book. The bad news is that Pavillion won’t be published for a while. It’s too complex for publishers to take a chance on it and you’regoing to get some really harsh rejections, but eventually it will come back to McSweeney’s who will do a nice production with illustrations. Also, your cat is going to die.

Yeah, I worry about Pavilion too. It’s a hard sell, but I think it’s good. Perhaps the strong reception of Bad Teeth will help it along. My cat may die eventually, but then so do we all. The sad part is that I no longer live with her. And that she will die, I suppose.

Thanks for letting me know you’re okay Dustin. And good luck with the books. I’m sure I’m not the only one looking forward to them. 

- – -

Shane Jones’s next novel Daniel Fights a Hurricane is out this summer.

By far, the most votes went to:

Elisa Gabbert & Mike Young: Moves in Contemporary Poetry

In fact, it was the only post that received multiple votes!

And here are the rest, presented alphabetically:

A D Jameson:

A Dozen Dominants: The Current State of US Indy Lit

Amy McDaniel:

Some Notes on Affect

Blake Butler:

All pigshit is writing.

HTMLGIANT’s 400 Under 1

Shit I Don’t Like About Writers & Writing

The Myth of the Human w/r/t David Foster Wallace’s ‘Mister Squishy’

22 Things I Learned from Submitting Writing

25 Important Books of the 00s

Chelsea Martin:

Wigger Chick

Christopher Higgs:

Against Answers: A Conversation with Kyle Minor

What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions with Miranda Mellis}

Impossible Mike:

An Issue of Desire in its Relation to the Textual Subject/Object

Expanded Literature Part 1: Internet Literature

THE ZERO-DEGREE NOISELESSNESS OF DEATH: LECTIO I-IV

THE ZERO DEGREE NOISELESSNESS OF DEATH: LECTIO V-VIII

TOP TEN INDIE-LIT DICKS WE’D RATHER SEE THAN JORDAN CASTRO’S

Jimmy Chen:

Expired Domain Girl

hitlertmlgiant

Justin Taylor:

Tables of Contents for The Quarterly, issue 1 – 25

J Wang:

Lineage: justifiable matricide vs. I mothered you hoes

On hand jobs, AWP, the internet, truck drivers, and embodied living

Ken Baumann:

The Beginner’s Guide to Deleuze

Michael Kimball:

Guest Lecture Series (1): Openings

Guest Lecture #2: Keeping Going

Guest Lecture #3: The Rough Parts

Guest Lecture #4: Story and Plot

Guest Lecture #5: Language and Sentences

Mike Young:

Magazine Databases-Magazine Debasers

There was also an impassioned plea for the Boobs Friday archive, which you can find by searching the site for “boobs.”

Finally, for added value (as well as comparison’s sake), here are the 50 most popular posts in HTMLGIANT history (i.e., the ones that have received the most page views):

1. J Wang: The expurgation of the clitoris in the diary of Anne Frank
2. Jimmy Chen: Expired Domain Girl
3. Amy McDaniel: Found-ish Poetry: The Sorted Books Project
4. Amy McDaniel: Grammar Challenge!
5. Jimmy Chen: The Painter
6. Amy McDaniel: Grammar Challenge: Answers and Explanations
7. Blake Butler: Visceral Readings: The Sluts
8. Jimmy Chen: Sartre publishes ‘The Wall’ on his facebook wall
9. Jimmy Chen: Raskolnikov’s inbox
10. Jimmy Chen: Boob Friday Halloween Special Haiku Contest
11. Michael Schaub: Power Quote: W. S. Merwin
12. Roxane Gay: Another Random List of Things
13. Blake Butler: Mike Tyson on Writing
14. Blake Butler: The Myth of the Human w/r/t David Foster Wallace’s ‘Mister Squishy’
15. Jimmy Chen: Author venn diagram
16. Blake Butler: 22 Things I Learned from Submitting Writing
17. Mike Young: Moves in Contemporary Poetry
18. Blake Butler: 25 Important Books of the 00s
19. Brian Foley: 25 Important Books of Poetry of the 00s
20. pr: ‘Parker’s Back’ by Flannery O’Connor
21. Blake Butler: HTMLGIANT’s 400 Under 1
22. Lily Hoang: pla(y)giarism versus plagiarism
23. Blake Butler: Boobs Friday: Noy Holland
24. Reynard Seifert: Tentacles Are Hair You Wear On Your Spleen, Ideally
25. pr: You want ice cream and bags of chips and chocolate and blood and guts and drugs and sex and cigarettes
26. Jimmy Chen: A Book Lover’s Guide to IKEA seating
27. Blake Butler: Gucci Mane vs. Young Jeezy
28. Justin Taylor: Hey, want to be in a book? … Get in the chair.
29. Brandon Scott Gorrell, Ryan Call, & Gene Morgan: A Review of Reviews of Shoplifting From American Apparel
30. Roxane Gay: The Price of Revelation
31. Blake Butler: DFW Praise Compendium
32. Jordan Castro: Some Thoughts Re Muumuu House
33. Blake Butler: James Joyce does not exist
34. Blake Butler: HTMLGIANT’s Tournament of Bookshit
35. Roxane Gay: A Profound Sense of Absence
36. Christopher Higgs: BlazeVOX Goes Vanity Press?
37. Justin Taylor: A Million Little Top 3′s: The 2009 List of Lists
38. Michael Schaub: The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature: Let’s Bet Cash Money on This
39. Nick Antosca: REASONS YOU SHOULD NOT DATE WRITERS (IF YOU ARE A WRITER)
40. Blake Butler: BOOBS FRIDAY; Kendra is going as full erections across America
41. Blake Butler: 12 New Tao Lin
42. Blake Butler: Famous Authors ‘Nude’
43. Christopher Higgs: Art, Crime, Beauty, Murder
44. pr: Sonnets for Saturday
45. Christopher Higgs: BlazeVOX Update
46. Roxane Gay: Seriously, Though… Some Thoughts on Writers Who Take Themselves Seriously
47. Matthew Simmons: Tin House
48. Roxane Gay: Taking No For An Answer: Some New Thoughts on Self-Publishing
49. Jimmy Chen: God damn it
50. Blake Butler: Everything I Submitted from 2006-2008 & What Happened To It

… That’s out of the roughly 7000 posts that have been published since 26 September 2008, 11:38am. (If you want the actual numbers, you’ll have to buy me something.)

Enjoy!