‘If it moves you to attentiveness, it is art.  If it doesn’t, it’s something else.’

-from an excellent interview with Milton Glaser, just one of many

The marketing and mythologizing comment thread on the Moya essay recalled, for me, David Foster Wallace’s remarkable 2004 review of a Borges biography. Wallace talks about the intentional fallacy and, if my reading is correct, indicts the practice of literary biography in general. (The connection to the Moya essay is oblique, but the review is worth reading on any terms.)

Thank god, I’ve been waiting for this: Bolaño Inc.: “The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S.” [Via Matt Kirkpatrick.]

“Hitler had the right idea; he was just an underachiever! Kill’ em all, Adolf! All of ’em! Jew, Mexican, American, White, kill ’em all! Start over, the experiment didn’t work!” – Bill Hicks

Kristy Bowen, from Dancing Girl Press, characterizes her reason for publishing chapbooks:

I’ve always seen an editor more as a collector.  I know a lot of people see them more as gatekeepers, culling the wheat from the chaff, but I think what I choose depends far more on my own tastes and whims than on any standard of what anyone else considers “good” poetry. What I tend to like or publish might not appeal to everyone all the time, but I always feel a bit more like someone collecting culture rather than passing judgment on  it.

Plenty of more people from a notable variety of presses talking about chapbooks over at the November issue of The Chapbook Review, as well as reviews of five chapbooks.

It is all the same to me–the goddamn fancy phony rug, what’s on it and its fucking whereabouts.

Gordon Lish, ‘How to Write a Poem’

hell yeah.  noah cicero’s THE HUMAN WAR is going to be made into a movie.  here’s an interesting post explaining his view on the book as it has aged.

new ACTION YES.

Yesterday I (finally) received the proof of Joseph Young’s collection of microfiction, Easter Rabbit. A company in St Louis is handling the printing. They are eco-friendly and their pricing is very competitive, but they were slow as cold shit getting this proof out. Anyway — the book is gorgeous. Really damn hell gorgeous.

Now I’m hard at work on the next book, for a late January/February release. It’s a 200-page collection of poetry by Mairéad Byrne. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, I HIGHLY recommend checking out her eBook released from ubu/web: SOS Poetry.

It’s nice sometimes to just say some shit, isn’t it? “When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction’s day is done,” Yagoda says.