NYC Area Alert: The launch party for LIT #17  (the journal of the New School graduate writing program) is tonight at Housing Works bookstore & cafe. Sasha Fletcher, Phillip Gardner, Anne Ray, and the inimitable Jennifer L. Knox will be rendering their readerly services. The facebook page claims that space is limited and so you need to RSVP if you’re going, but my bet is that if you show up, they’ll figure out a way to get you in. I am very excited about this and planning to attend, so think about your desire to hear these readers, weigh it against your desire to potentially interact with me, and plan your evening accordingly.

On his mother: “Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. To say, confronted with a certain photograph, ‘That’s almost the way she was!’ was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, ‘That’s not the way she was at all.’ The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status–which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother: sometimes, in the dream, there is something misplaced, something excessive: for example, something playful or casual–which she never was; or again I know it is she, but I do not see her features (but do we see, in dreams, or do we know?): I dream about her, I do not dream her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.”

–Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 66

Coudal Partners asked people to read poetry into their answering machine. The result is Verse by Voice.

1. Incredible post by Derek White on “travel writing,” specifically Crawford, Zornoza, and Lopez.
2. If it’s not already, Kate Zambreno’s blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister should be in your feed. A feast.
3. This $10k for disappearing challenge sounds like the one to sign up for.

“He died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless, elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.” An excerpt from Gilbert Sorrentino’s posthumous novel The Abyss of Human Illusion at The Brooklyn Rail.

From Michael Rudin’s “Writing the Great American Novel Video Game” at Fiction Writers Review: “The keyboard we writers know so intimately… lives a double life, spellbound in passionate affairs with a video game community that dotes on it as affectionately as we authors ever have. For every keystroke a writer uses to describe character or establish scene, somewhere in cyberspace a gamer uses these same keys to navigate gunships and commandeer submarines.”

I wonder what Juked feels about Sotto Voce‘s design.

If I have to hear the phrase pitch perfect one more time, I’m going to throw up in someone’s shoes. What does that mean? I mean, what does it really mean?

P.S. The second installment of Group Effort is coming soon!

Daniel Green of The Reading Experience has just posted a compilation of online interviews with contemporary writers over at Secondary Sound. Many classics are in there, but I also discovered a few I had not seen before. Feel free to supplement in the comments section.

Another arrow into February’s skull. New Hobart is out. All good, and this Laird Hunt interview (part two) amazing.