More excellence from MK, NNT & KS
Mike Kitchell: his big screening log.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Don’t tell my publishers, but as soon as I see a book of mine in the stores, my book is dead for me. My book is only alive when I am still writing it otherwise it does not respond to me anymore (Socrates who hated the written word said the same about the statues of Daedalus: you cannot talk to them). I only like to talk about things (LIKE THIS) I am writing.” and “I was explaining Antifragility to my Italian publisher: a writer is antifragile, a blue-collar worker robust, others fragile. If I beat up an economist, I would spent a few days in an Italian jail, but book sales would shoot up and my message wd be authentic. People would be convinced of the validity of my DeVany-style workout. If a corporate executive did the same his career …” Both of those from his Facebook.
Kickstarter: Howard Glitch, a multimedia jigsaw puzzle.
Flatmancrooked has decided to offer Expedited Submissions where a senior editor will respond to such submissions in 14 days or fewer. The fee? $5. I understand the inclination, have definitely considered some sort of tiered submission structure, but remain uncomfortable with the idea of charging for submissions (and conversely, paying to submit). As a person who enjoys instant gratification, I like the idea of knowing the time frame within which my work will be considered. That privilege just might be worth $5 to me. Then again, I am increasingly less preoccupied with things like response times. And yet. And back and forth I go. Thoughts? Will you pay to play?
Peter Taylor on His Teachers
(from Conversations with Peter Taylor, edited by Hubert H. McAlexander)
Bonnie Jo Campbell and the Strategy of Negation
I keep returning to Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story “The Solutions to Ben’s Problem,” which was first published in The Diagram, and was subsequently reprinted in her collection American Salvage as “The Solutions to Brian’s Problem.” (American Salvage was originally published by tiny Wayne State University Press, and then republished by Norton after the book became an unlikely but well-chosen National Book Award finalist.)
“The Solutions to Ben’s Problem” is structured unlike any other story I’ve read. The problem, which is never directly articulated, is that Ben’s wife Connie is a meth addict who can’t moderate her increasingly dangerous behavior. To make matters worse, READ MORE >
Lacan gets punk’d
A young ideologue punks Lacan in the name of situationism by pouring water on his desk and pelting him with soggy paper.
Reminds me of the part in Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” that goes:
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
Pranks as politics.
Two Bejeweled Holiday Offers; Of Both I Did Partake
[I]
Get any two Single-author titles for only $12 w/ free U.S. shipping
[I did Ghost Machine by Ben Mirov + Cure All by Kim Parko]
[II]
Instructions:
1) Purchase one title via PayPal.
2) When completing your order, put the title of your free book in the “Shipping Instructions” line.
3) Your books will arrive in 7-10 days.
As always, shipping for all orders purchased through our website is FREE.
This offer is good through December 31, 2010. Limit 3 (Three) free titles per order.
[I did A Prank of Georges by Thalia Field and Abigail Lang
+ Adorno’s Noise by Carla Harryman]
Here Is An Obscure Book of Poetry I Like
I only learned about Steve Davenport’s Uncontainable Noise because it was published by tiny Pavement Saw Press in 2006, and Pavement Saw Press was based in Columbus, Ohio, where I happened to live, and the assistant editor there (who was also a night manager at the Kroger’s supermarket where I sometimes shopped for groceries) was taking classes from a friend of mine, and pressed a copy on my friend, and soon my friend was pressing copies on everyone he knew. And, as it happens, the night my copy was pressed on me, my second child was unexpectedly (and dangerously) born three months early, by emergency C-section. And so it was that I found myself in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, one hand in an isolette, those fingers touching a baby the size of my hand, and the other hand holding a copy of Uncontainable Noise, reading poems with such muscular titles as “Arrange Their Sea-Smooth Bones In Fourteen Broken Rows” and “Last Night My Bed A Bed of Whiskey Going Down” and “Murfy Blesses The Cowboy Of Drunken Love’s Love.” The preferred form of the poems was the Yodel, which is, as best I can tell a fourteen line poem of twelve syllables per unrhymed line, which contains at least one if not twenty-seven words of the relative intensity of slaughter, bomb, swagger, massacre, exploding, or, in the case of “Watch The Hot Young Women On Puritan Benches,” blow, beat, and bang bang. The rest of the poems take such forms as the horse opera, the clap-without-cure, the mountain price, the hayseed flaneur, and the hundred-line drunken cowboy sonnet. And I almost forgot to tell you about thirteen-page cycle of contentious love poems, the lovers in question being Georgia O’Keeffe and Wallace Stevens, who do things like drive to Holy Ghost, Illinois; perform their love in trees; move West and argue about flowers; make like monsters over New Mexico; go for their guns; plead with the seven angels of confusion; drink outside a bowling alley; and undo their bundle of hiss. READ MORE >
77 interviews and now you people be happy goddamn you etc 14
5. Some MFA fuck will host the Oscars.
77. In other sad news:
14. Flash Fiction interviews Nicolle Elizabeth. I thank them.
My favorite part of it is that it isn’t getting another print run. Can I say that?
111. Kyle Hemmings interview at Dark Sky Magazine.
One of the biggest influences, besides other writers, was the nine or ten years I spent on the streets of New York, when I became addicted to the club scene.
1. Me here. My father brings novels to family reunions, funerals, and weddings. They are secreted in large pockets of his jacket. He brings them out, he reads them during the various proceedings. People have said things. But is this so wrong?