Snippets

“Do you think a work that is faulty but which has fine and powerful things in it can be considered to have less authenticity than a work that is perfect but without inner resonance?” – Artaud, who will kill himself less than one year after asking (via this gorgeous object)

Anybody get some new cool junk to read? Or eat? Or touch? I have two 700 pp. nonfiction books on my lap, like someone’s sitting on me.

Major holiday lag & leisure has led to these recent fascinations: Robbie Cooper has been posting a slew of interesting glimpses, Ryland Walker Knight–increasingly my most cherished cinematic mind online–provides us another conjunction of quotations, 3:AM mag‘s got an Xmas mix going featuring a favorite from The Fall, VVORK supplies the sludge, Spencer Ackerman talks beautifully about Guantanamo Bay, Lauren Leto stereotypes people by their favorite authors (a favorite: Thomas Aquinas – Premature ejaculators), Lined & Unlined continues their six-part meditation on the production of text from the text’s point of view, the Concord Free Press continues to publish beautifully designed (and good?) books then give them away free yes free, and an unknown Italian maintains further a warped body blog. Merry Xmas!

Kind of crushing article at Wired about the recently disbanded, 12 year process of creation, repetition, competition, innovation involved on creating the failed video game sequel Duke Nukem Forever: “George Broussard, co-owner of 3D Realms and the man who headed the Duke Nukem Forever project for its entire 12-year run. Now 46 years old, he’d spent much of his adult life trying to make a single game, and failed over and over again.”

At the Huffington Post, disturbing snowmen.

What is the most nervous you have ever been while giving a reading?

When people started binding books for the first time, do you think a bunch of people were really mad because they were just way into the way a scroll looks and feels? Did they tell people that scrolls were totally more authentic?

I would rather teach one T.C. Boyle story 50 times (i.e. this one)  than read another two.

If one were going to have a ‘John Ashbery 101’ course, what would be the syllabus? I want to dig, and am not sure where to start, and don’t really just want to pick up the Selected. Flow Chart I recall being compelled by, as well as Three Poems (I believe it was in the McSweeney’s issue that Justin edited that someone talked about a writing assignment from Donald Barthelme being “get a bottle of wine, a copy of Three Poems, and write four pages in an evening.”). Anyway, help?

Robert Swartwood nicely calls out Narrative Magazine on twitter about their $20 submission fees and their $10K NEA grant FOR A WEBSITE [“helps (a little)”] and they, as usual, avoid giving a straight answer. Bring em coal, Santa!