More incredible work at Kier’s blog.

“The Wish to be a Red Indian”
by Franz Kafka
Trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.

READ MORE >

The top ten list just released [left] is almost identical as last year’s [right], except University of Massachusetts Amherst was dropped, replaced by Syracuse University. If you care about your future, the drive will take you approximately 4 hours and 23 minutes. If you have to cry in the car, please roll down the windows, as your tears will evaporate quicker. A good place to hide acid tabs should you be pulled over is under your eyelids. A good place to blow someone is America. The best way to get there:

READ MORE >

On Sunday, August 15, 2010 Eva Talmadge and I shot a book trailer for our forthcoming photo-anthology, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. First we spent a couple of hours with our videographer, Dev, at Eva’s apartment. We answered some questions, tried not to cut each other off too much, and did an impromptu scrounge of Eva’s library for books that inspired tattoos included in our book. I guess we found about two dozen. Then it was off to the legendary Fineline Tattoo on 1st Street and 1st Avenue. Fineline is the longest continually running tattoo shop in New York City, with a history that goes back into the underground days when tattooing was still illegal in Manhattan. Eva and our agent, Brandi Bowles, got themselves some literary tattoos from Mehai Bakaty, the son of Fineline founder Mike Bakaty and a worldclass tattooist in his own right. (I had initially promised to get inked, too. Needless to say, I bailed.) The trailer itself should be available sometime in the next couple weeks, but in the meantime I offer the following photo gallery- a preview of the preview, if you will (please do).

READ MORE >

An awesome appreciation of one of my three favorite video games & media experiences. (others: Chrono Trigger & Final Fantasy VI (or III on the version I had))

As Jonathan Franzen solemnly graces the cover of TIME magazine, we got to thinking who of his peers were also deserving of a cover on other magazines, and what those magazines might be. Here are our top picks:

Joseph Young says, “I began writing NAME, my vampire novel, on July 7, 2010 and completed the first draft on August 7, 2010. It is 20 chapters and 125 pages. I wrote NAME to pay my rent.”

John Dermot Woods is doing the cover art!

Here’s an excerpt:

He stood for just a moment, contemplating the thing that was coming. He didn’t have to do it, didn’t have to come to the girl in the red bikini and call to her. He didn’t have to listen to the voice inside her head, sounding so much like the slosh of the sea, like the spitting of blood in her throat, the inside voice that would tell him her name.

As he approached, her pink toes curled into the wet sand, he trained his mind to hers, narrowing his attention to dive below the surface of her dampened hair, into the twirled sea of her thought. He slipped into her mind like a man dropping into a nighttime wave, soundless and effortless, looking for a pearl tumbled in dark water. He swam there for only a moment, grasping the dark and shining word, Jennifer, before coming to the surface with it: Jennifer.

As he came near her, her arms settled loosely across her bikini top, he called that name. “Jennifer,” he said, waving. “Hello.”

The girl, her red bikini flashing in the dark, her hair tumbled in a curl of waves above her eyes, turned toward him. Her own name in the throat of a strange boy didn’t startle her. She opened, arms falling away from her chest, the now unprotected skin of her belly, her throat.

To preorder NAME, please make a donation of at least $10.00

Look
what
is
finally
getting
reprinted
!!!

From Flickr user samelovesherdog

I’m not happy right now. A few days ago I read this article in The Guardian that included phrases like “unapologetically female” and tried to link all contemporary writing by American Women back to Candance Bushnell, author of the Sex & The City column which spawned a book and the HBO series and the most obnoxious 25% of the female population of New York City. I know it’s probably silly and naive and suspiciously female of me, but I expect more from The Guardian than an article like this.

Full disclosure: I didn’t know that Sex & The City was based on a book or that the book came from a column written in the 90’s in the New York Observer. That still doesn’t make any of it interesting to me. The whole Sex & The City phenomenon probably did have an effect on making Americans a little less prude in the way they talk about sex, and I can appreciate that from a distance. People in their 40’s and 50’s might be ‘more comfortable talking about sex’ now, but the 20 and 30 somethings I know were teenagers before sex & the city and already talked about sex more candidly than a bunch of white chicks drunk on vodka. We didn’t need their permission, but this is really beside the point.

The point is, I am not OK with The Guardian trying to find the root of a literary shift in Sex & The City. The tail didn’t wag the dog; the culture shifted. Nonfiction and memoir have been on the rise in America for a while now and trying to connect all female essayists back to Sex & The City is just lazy and absurd. Lazy and absurd and irritating.

READ MORE >

I. Surrogate Book as Book

One is given not just a hypothetical cover of the book, but an entire surrogate book as a manifested object residing in space. This may point to modern painting’s preoccupation with the represented vs. the actual, or it may be some self-reflexive fetishism of books themselves, as if to congratulate the reader for picking one — that one — up.

—

READ MORE >

And really, it makes perfect sense. The pseudo-anonymity of virtual interactions and the anarchic vibe the Internet has going makes it easy to be angry online. Venting about any number of subjects, finely tuning our snark in a witticism dicksizing competition is the perfect panacea for the impotence of quotidian life. I don’t mind anger. It often amuses me, the way people froth at the fingertips to rail against the end of, well, everything. Today, the Internet is angry about Justin Bieber, the 16 year old with the bowl head haircut. I like to think of myself as pop culture savvy but I don’t know much about the Bieber. I know he’s young and cute. I know he sings though I’ve not heard one of his songs. I know tween girls lose their minds over him because he’s just so dreamy. He’s their Ralph Macchio. I swooned over Ralph. I had a Tiger Beat poster of the original (and one true) karate kid on my wall.

READ MORE >

Just about one year to the day (7/24/09) from when the idea was launched from this very blog, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is an imminent reality. The book–a full-color photo-anthology co-edited by Eva Talmadge and yours truly–will hit stores in October. You’ll be hearing plenty more about it then (we hope), but in the meantime I wanted to let folks know that we now have a website up and running at tattoolit.com. The site–which is primarily a tumblr–updates daily with re-blogs of literary tattoos from around the web that we find, literary quotations that seem like they might be worth writing on your body forever, and in the future will also have some previews/excerpts from the book itself, a book trailer, and whatever else we think of. You can also follow TattooLit on Twitter (the Twitterfeed streams to the website, but please don’t let this stop you from following it). Also^2, there’s the Facebook page.  Also^3, even though the book is finished, we’d be glad to post a picture of your literary tattoo on any and all of the above-mentioned, so if you have one or are getting one, please feel free & encouraged to send them our way.

All the (newly) Roman pirate gold in one place…

Both Peter Falk’s “Columbo” and Jacques Derrida underwent uncharacteristic measures to discover the truth, though the latter’s was so deconstructed and linguistically bloated it chased its own tale. “To pretend, I actually do the thing. I have therefore only pretended to pretend,” he once said. Pretend you’re hearing that in French, now find the nearest stale baguette and pretend to hit him.

READ MORE >

The random ass live reading is over. I will probably do it again, maybe once or twice a month when there are new books to talk about.

Here are the books I randomly read pages from this evening on uStream:

Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonson, translated by Johannes Goransson
How They Were Found by Matt Bell
The Black Eye by Brian Foley
Richard Yates by Tao Lin
Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis
The Cow by Ariana Reines
Pilot by Johannes Goransson

Deeply excited to spread of word of Emily Toder’s Brushes With, which is a little book about meeting shapes that’s coming out from Tarpaulin Sky. Stop shaving your home bases and practicing the same three chords and have a look at this. Excerpt after the jump:

READ MORE >