5 required test of the status of the gouts of yellow snot of
11. I never understand what a translator must feel. To “guess” what word might represent the author’s intent. Like dancing about architecture or fucking about bowling parties, I’m sure. Here is a fascinating interview about translating Haruki Murakami.
55. At a thousand thousands, Sam Lipsyte reads Hob Broun.
5. There is no # 5. Ok, this: Taylor Swift is vacuous. So there is no # 5.
14444. Sean D. Kelly writes an essay about Scylla, blow-driers, Charybdis of religious delusion, the conditions of thigh chaffing and self-deception, the dancer as the dance, and the anxiety and nihilism of George Michael/Nietzschean post-God secularism. Well done, sir. And worth your time. Click. Trust me.
7. Hey you opinionated cacafuegos. What makes bad writing bad? This is sharp blow glow. Watch:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raWLS2_PEfI
There’s no rule that says you get steadily better.
I had a big Hemingway boner.
It’s pretty bad.
middle-where?
What’s the difference between middle-class and bourgeois? Cultural consumption? Money? Conspicuous consumption? The size of tv screen or SUV?
I ask because I’ve been thinking about flaneurs a lot, especially the modern flaneur and what he would embody. Findings to come, as I find them. They are somewhere, probably between the covers of The Arcades Project.
Wind Call Swill Stein 2xQs Again
French rap is weird
1. Super thrilled to hear via twitter that Coffee House Press will be putting out a new collection by Brian Evenson, Windeye. Hopefully by 2011? No date word yet, but Evenson is the kind that I go stand in line for. If you haven’t read the titular story yet, it is gorgeous, and available via PEN America.
2. At Electric Literature, Melissa Broder interviews Ryan Call about, what else, litblogging.
3. James Yeh has a new chapbook out, 9/16/10, from a rad small press making beautiful objects, Swill Children.
4. The Complete Recordings of Gertrude Stein Reading Her Own Works @ PennSound
5. Interview with Dorothea Lasky by Nafiza Islam at Thoughts Interjected & interview with Patrick Somerville by Tobias Carroll at Vol 1. Brooklyn.
6. At Ubu, Doug Nufer’s Never Again, a 163 pg. novel with no word appearing more than once, which I discovered after an awesome conversation wondering if such a thing existed with Heather Christle and Christopher DeWeese, both of whom have books coming from Octopus in 2011 that I am also mega excited for.
Suggested Reading List for My Spring 2011 Fiction Workshop
(Because if you’re going to make a writer of yourself, you must read your brains out.) *
All Things, All at Once, Lee K. Abbott
The Box Man, Kobo Abe
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian
A Death in the Family, James Agee
Man In His Time, Brian W. Aldiss READ MORE >
A Bit of This, A Bit of That
Metazen is putting together a Christmas anthology for charity and they’re seeking submissions.
Hart House Review, a literary magazine from the University of Toronto, is also looking for submissions.
Are you interested in some rad poetry? Consider making a donation to NOO Journal and they will make you a rad poem.
Holiday Sales
I’ve tried to gather after the jump as many holiday sales as I could find over the weekend. Secret Santas, pay attention; some of these sales go above the $20 limit, but you can always keep some books, send other books, or bust the limit knowing you might not get the same in return. Any editors/publishers who’d like to drop their special on our internet, do so in the comments or email me and I’ll add the sales here. For those not in Secret Santa, many of these will still apply to you, though some are only for Secret Santa participants. If you haven’t, please consider signing up to participate in the exchange.
False Dichotomies Are Not Honorable
1. Money and art are not mutually exclusive.
2. The issue of a piece of writing’s power as art is a separate issue from the question of whether the piece of writing was published by a large commercial press or a small not-for-profit press.
3. When large commercial presses invest in new literature, despite the market pressures which discourage investment in new literature, those presses should be embraced and supported by the community of readers which also embraces and supports the small presses who invest in new literature.
4. If a work of literature or the person who made it becomes successful in externally validating manners that transcend the small circle of serious readers that constituted the original audience because the work was promoted by the high-powered machinery that can attend to a book released by a large commercial publisher, that work of literature and that writer ought to be congratulated and their worldly success applauded by the small circle of readers that constituted the original audience.
5. Obscurity as a writer is neither inherently honorable nor inherently dishonorable.
quote-o-the-day
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.
James Norman Hall
True dat, Mr. Hall. Internet, coffee maker, gazing out the window at the snow—it may seem like not-writing, even now, but the mind stirs the pink shirt that becomes the fish that sings the flamelets of river, also known as words. For all the clatter of the laboriousness of writing, you should be thankful that every time your eye tingles cotton triangles, your lingual papillae meet ketchup (one of the only foods to trigger all 5 taste receptors: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, umami), your hand grips the perfect heft of a green bocce ball, you are indeed writing. Or you could read a book, another form of osmosis, but Hall isn’t talking about reading, me thinks, because reading is not loafing, no matter how far you drift away…so when someone on Facebook pokes you about yet another 8500 words, or when Joyce Carol Oates belches and out floats her 83rd lurid tale of obsession, etc., etc., relax, relax, go take a slow walk through a cow pasture, an interstate, a marriage, take a walk down through a brown couch, or a blog. You are loafing right now. I mean to say writing. Continue.
Some Stuff & Things
New issue of Vinyl Poetry has grocery litsts from the home team: Roxane Gay, Blake Butler, and Kyle Minor…plus a bunch of other good stuffs.
Word wizard Robert Kloss is Writer-In-Residence this month at Necessary Fiction, and he’s dedicating his month to doing some badass literary remixes of work from folks like Amber Sparks, J.A. Tyler, Michael Kimball, Me, James Tadd Adcox, and Andrew Borgstrom.
Speaking of Andrew Borgstrom, he has a new chapbook out called Explanations, from the almighty Cupboard.
This piece I read in Thought Catalog by Megan Boyle called “Everyone I’ve Had Sex With” captivated my attention. If you need or want more writing about sex, especially if you like stuff that might make you feel simultaneously uneasy and captivated, you should check out Janey Smith’s “Total Retard (Or How To Run a Successful Home School)” in the Lamination Colony swan song issue.
Next installment of my series “What is Experimental Literature?” coming soon!
A Bit of a Follow Up
It is difficult to talk about race and stressful and awkward and exhausting. To my mind, one of the reasons these conversations are so difficult, particularly between white people and people of color, is because, so often, white people question concerns raised as if the question is not “how do we solve this problem,” but rather, “does this problem exist.” This is not a debate about whether there are racial and class (and gender and sexuality) disparities in publishing. These disparities exist whether you (choose to) see them or not. Instead these kinds of discussions are intended to function like a magnifying glass on a problem so big it should not require a magnifying glass.
And yet, the magnifying glass is clearly needed.