Vimeo teaches me something about writing
Block Tests 01 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.
This person has taken Street Fighter and broken it down to its simplest shapes.
So, this and fiction. I’m not just thinking about minimalism v. maximalism here. I’m curious about breaking a story down to a simple shape. I’m thinking about Stephen Dixon’s amazing story “Said,” in which the dialogue tags remain, but all the dialogue has been removed. A pair of lines from the story (which, sadly, I don’t have in front of me) can be as simple as:
He said.
She said.
The actions, free of dialogue, remain.
I’ve been writing a story in nothing but dialogue for the past couple of weeks, and trying to figure out what, when you strip away the other constituent parts of a story, needs to remain.
This is what I think needs to remain. I came up with this watching that video.
The story must, no matter what you take away, move. In the video, Blanka and Ken continue to contend, lacking arms, lacking faces. They continue to move. In Dixon’s story, he says, she says. We don’t have anything other than context to interpret what would happen before or after the dialogue tags.
So. Move. Maybe? Just a guess, I suppose.
Friday G-Funk Throwback For Ya’ll Bitches (With Flute)
Don’t never forget bout Nate Dogg:
I got love.
Used Bookstore Finds: ‘This pen is gorgeous!’
After the previous used bookstore finds post, Aaron Gilbreath emailed me to say that he was currently working on a project based on the many objects he had discovered during his time working at Powell’s Books in Portland. He offered to share a few of those objects with HTMLGIANT, and I told him to send in whatever he wanted. After the break are three found objects and the entries he has written about them:
The Last Time I Buy a Copy of Cosmopolis
You ever have one of those books you just can’t seem to hold onto? For me, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is one of them. I’ve bought it several times over now–always in hardback, at the severely discounted price of $5, and always from The Strand–most recently yesterday. And I swear this is the last @#&$%-ing time. What happened to my other copies? I feel like one got left behind in a move. Maybe one is at my friend Amanda’s house in Portland, Ore, or else in storage in Nashville, TN where my parents put my shit when they got divorced and sold their house a couple years ago (unless the Nashville and Portland copies are *different* copies, which is also possible). Basically, by this point I’ve sunk enough money into cheap used Cosmopolises that I could have bought one at regular sticker price, which if I had done I probably would have actually taken care of. The funny thing is that it’s not like Cosmopolis is the greatest book ever, or anything. I’m a big DeLillo fan, to be sure, and I think it’s got a lot to be said for it, but it’s certainly not Underworld or The Names. It’s a short novel, and like all his work incredibly beautiful. It’s about a multi-multi-billionaire taking his limo across town to get a haircut. It’s a poem, really, a sort of elegy-in-advance for technologies that are obsolete before they’re even fully emergent (it’s set in the year 2000), and how money makes a man vast until he is no longer a man at all anymore, but something enormous and organic, powerful in ways the self cannot account for or comprehend. Imagine if the ocean tried to know itself, or a nebula did. I’ve always thought of the book as a sort of working-through of Marx’s proposition that “all that which is solid melts into air.” Maybe you’re getting a sense of why–even though it’s a relatively “minor” work–I keep finding myself drawn back to it. I wake up one day thinking, “Man I’d really like to take another look at Cosmopolis” and I reach for it and then it isn’t there. I’d say I’ve been feeling this way for about a month now, but especially since I read Nick Paumgarten’s “The Death of Kings” in The New Yorker a week or two ago. So, here I am, a humbled but determined owner–yet again–of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. I swear I’m going to take care of if this time, to hold it close.
I just park the cars, ma’m
In my search for a suitable image to place at the head of next week’s A Public Space giveaway post (issues 2-6, so look out for that), I discovered this video at Urban Prankster, which documents a project in 1994 that several artists organized at Southwestern College in Chula Vista.
On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red
Basically, they color-coded all the parking lots and had people park their cars according to some chart or something. It reminded me of Chris Cobb’s project in Adobe Books, but instead, like, with cars and lots of people and orange traffic vests and awkward interviews.
My favorite part of the video might be at 2:29, though some of the other things people say about the project are pretty funny. I can’t get the video to embed, so just click the link below.
Family Guy Stephen King Tribute Episode
For no particular reason, Family Guy has just done an episode of their own adaptations of Stephen King stories. I watched the episode on hulu yesterday. It won’t stay up there too long, since they only have 5 episodes at any given time, but I think it just went up. The Family Guy episode follows the basic pattern set by the Simpsons’s annual Treehouse of Horror specials, only without the peg to Halloween. The only thing about this that’s a bummer is that they parody the movies made out of the books, rather than the books themselves. Given that the guy is one of the best-selling writers on the planet, it stands to reason that they could have snagged at least ONE of his unfilmed stories to send up. Oh well. The first one, a parody of Stand By Me (published as “The Body” in King’s novella-collection Different Seasons) is definitely the strongest of the three. The second one is a parody of Misery with Brian as the kidnapped writer and Stewie as Annie Wilkes, and the last one is a pretty faithful re-creation of The Shawshank Redemption (originally published as “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, also in Different Seasons). Fun fact: three out of the four novellas in different seasons have been made into films. The third is “Apt Pupil,” about a kid who discovers his neighbor is an ex-Nazi, but instead of turning him in blackmails him and then becomes his sort of weird partner in crime. The movie had Brad Renfro, I think. The last story in the collection, “The Breathing Method,” is the only one not to have been adapted, and odds are against its ever being done. It’s understated, but basically weird as hell– a sort of drawing room ghost story with some weird Lovecraft shout-outs tossed in for good measure.
man, this is cool.
molly gaudry (see blog for complete list of duties, honors, writings, amateur boxing record, etc.) has created a poem that is culled from various blogs. each line is a link. fucking cool.
Literary (and Ancient History) Lessons from Metal Magazines: Absu
- This is the band Absu.
As I was sitting around watching an 8 hour tape of tennis happening in Madrid, I also perused the English Metal Magazine Terrorizer and, as always, learned some new words and in this case, also increased my knoweldge of ancient cultures. READ MORE >
Used Bookstore Finds: ‘Camels in my mouth and the cast of STOMP in my head’
A few years ago, I worked at a used bookstore in Fairfax, Virginia. I found a lot of interesting stuff tucked into various books or written on their pages as I sorted through the incoming boxes, but my favorite discovery fell out of a copy of Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain: the following handwritten letter, dated 2/22/99, which I’ve done my best to type out below the picture.
Peter,
You deserve so much more than this loose leaf notebook paper but if I don’t say what I want to now I’m afraid the time will pass. As I laid next to you with a herd of camels in my mouth and the cast of STOMP in my head and a 20yr. marriage falling apart – I felt soft and safe and wanted. There was no way I was going to let any more abandonment and indiscretion into my friendship with you. I love your spirit, your genius, your unlimited style, your Whiting-Davis, your energy – just you Peter, The Person – and I am forever in your debt for how you watched over me.
Sincerely,
Your Queen Priscus,
Wini
I cannot bring myself to get rid of this letter. I’m fascinated by it. I hope these past ten years have been kind to Wini and Peter’s friendship.
If you have interesting used bookstore finds, feel free to email us.
I THINK SHANE JONES IS NOT A GOOD PERSON FOR DELETING HIS BLOG BUT I KIND OF UNDERSTAND
what the fuck mang? am i typing in the wrong address? shane jones, no longer blogging? does this mean no longer writing? no longer blogging but still writing is ok. no longer blogging and no longer writing sucks the water out of shit and boils it mang. say it ain’t so shane. after reading light boxes and an excerpt from the failure six , i would be genuinely bummed if this were true. it’s like, fuck. then again, who doesn’t think about deleting his/her blog and just running into the woods forever.