Of Etymology
*UPDATE* 1) I’m a moron, it already happened, and 2) [courtesy of Mark Baumer] “Going nuts” for Tea Bagging and “Teabag mouthpieces” on Fox News — with either a straight face or pun-laced implicit irony (I really can’t tell), both of which would be brilliant.
McSweeney’s (or is it McSweeney’s’s?) The Future Dictionary of America (2004) did it’s own wonderful thing, but what I really want to see is someone publish the ENTIRE Urban Dictionary, which is less self-conscious as being a cultural artifact and probably has more ‘street cred,’ because contributors are, um, completely teen ghetto. I’m always delighted, and in awe, of the creativity and organic etymology of the words. It’s a great resource for people concerned with ‘contemporary culture.’ Some examples after the break.
Google Searches & Maurice Blanchot
At his blog, Mathias Svalina’s many screen-captures offer a better argument for Flarf than it ever dreamed of making for itself.
And over at his blog, today Dennis Cooper is all about the amazing Maurice Blanchot.
My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)
Time Out New York and Poets&Writers say kind things about things
Michael Miller wrote a nice article in the latest issue of Time Out New York praising three fine journals: The New York Tyrant, Agriculture Reader, and NOON. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s an excerpt or two:
Started in 2007, The New York Tyrant is the brainchild of GianCarlo DiTrapano, a former intern at FSG who decided to sell his house in New Orleans to start a literary mag, which he now produces in his studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. “I look for writing where it’s evident the authors have sweat over it,” he recently told TONY over drinks in midtown. “I respect writing where the authors expose the shit out of themselves and take risks.”
And this:
Agriculture Reader is so DIY that the first issue was entirely handmade. This is no small feat: According to Jeremy Schmall, who edits the publication with Justin Taylor, each cover had to be hand-painted and hand-cut. Now in its third installment, the zine-ish publication leans more toward poetry than the Tyrant does, but it shares a commitment to publishing bold voices and finding an audience.“Publishing is a conversation, and we don’t want to only be talking to our own little clique,” says Taylor. “I wouldn’t say that we have any particular aesthetic criteria, other than that the work has to thrill us in some way.”
Keyhole Lifetime Subscription on Ebay
Um, wow… here’s a rad one:
Keyhole Lifetime Subscription
The starting bid is 99¢
*U.S. bidders only*
Subscription includes all past releases that are still in print and everything we release in the future.
What you’ll get now:
Keyhole 5 (handwritten issue)
Keyhole 6
Questionstruck by William Walsh
Spill by Curtis Crisler
Later this year you’ll get:
- Phantasmagoria by Thomas Cooper (May)
- One of These Things Is Not Like the Others by Stephanie Johnson (June)
- Now Playing by Shellie Zacharia (September)
- How to Predict the Weather by Aaron Burch (December)
- Plus 3 new issues of Keyhole, a quarterly, perfect bound journal (May, August, November)
That’s 11 books this year aloneWe’re lining up some good stuff for next year too, including William Walsh’s collection of stories, Ampersand, Mass.
And we’ll throw in a free one-year subscription for a friend
I think you’re going to have to fight me for this. Let’s go.
NewVillager + Fantastic Information
NY by way of CA strange-pop band NewVillager, self-proclaimed into the “Chinese Pop | Dutch Pop | Spanish Pop” markets, is a music for the meat inside your hair. Consisiting of super pal Ross Simonini, plus the magic brother in Ben Bromley, these lads are making post-Peter Gabriel past-Animal Collective way-past-Beck wildness.
As a man quite tired of most new music, the sounds here are nice in that they are both new sounding in their layers and yet not so gone that they need to appear only on hipster iPods stuffed next to Sunn O)))) snore. Sounds new, and they can actually sing? Dang.
Anyway, you can do a listen to their first two tracks, ‘Rich Doors’ and ‘Genghis On’ for free on the myspace. Go peek. If you dig, tracks are available for download from iTunes, and on vinyl, both findable through the myspace profile.
Even more germane to the forum is the band’s vast repertoire of profile and press information, including band history, reviews, and other, supplied by a motley crew of sources, which I will excerpt after the break: READ MORE >
Daniel Green’s new venture
Who has globes anymore?
Dan Green runs what I consider to be one of the most thoughtful literature blogs. It’s called The Reading Experience. In 2004 he wrote about something I wrote about criticism and dissed me in a really nice way (here’s that). He knows his stuff and writes with great attention about serious, new literature. Now he is starting a journal-ish thing that HTML Giant readers should know about. READ MORE >
Dragons With Cancer
Bradley Sands and I wanted to make an electronic anthology that took Bizarro authors and Blogzarro authors and featured two stories from each, one “real” and one “unreal.” We let everything else figure itself out. And now you can read Dragons With Cancer either online or as a PDF. Read and click. Keep up on things. They’re loading all emotions into a rocket and sending it to Mars, so if you have any left you should use them soon. List of authors after the jump.
Novella Compendium
Clusterfuck!
A few weeks ago I got an email from John Madera asking me to come up with a list of novellas that I like and some explanations about why I like them. John said he had asked “a bunch of writers” what their favorite novellas are and had gotten a “good” response back. I was thinking it would be something like ten people, fifteen max. Actually, this novella compendium includes entries and lists from every writer with a modicum of web presence.
A few: Nick Antosca, Ken Baumann, Blake Butler, Brian Evenson, Shane Jones, Sean Kilpatrick, Carole Maso, Christine Schutt, Matthew Simmons, Justin Taylor, William Walsh, John Dermot Woods, Steve Almond, Christopher Higgs, Lily Hoang, Michael Joyce, Michael Kimball, Gary Lutz, AND! David Shields AND! many, many others.
The Grateful Dead…
Donna Jean & Jerry onstage at the Winterland Ballroom
…are on the top of the New York Times website right now. It makes me love life. Ben Ratliff provides a concise introduction to GD/taper culture and engages in the fine art of arguing about what the best Dead show/tour/era of all time is/was. The hook for all this is that the surviving band (now known simply as The Dead) is touring again, and Grateful Dead Productions has just released To Terrapin: Hartford ’77 (which I am listening to right now- there’s a 19 minute version of “Sugaree!” On disc ONE!!). 5/28/77 is a fascinating choice because it was a mere 20 days after 5/8/77 at Cornell, a show which is historically regarded by most hardcore fans as THE BEST Grateful Dead show and which has never seen an official release. (Personally, I think there’s a good argument to be made for 12/31/78, The Closing of Winterland, which is where the photo above was taken.)
Deadheads have often been polled about their favorite show, through fanzines and Web sites. The answers have stayed fairly consistent. May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, Cornell University. The pairing of Feb. 13 and 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York — perhaps the first widely traded shows. The Veneta and Binghamton shows. You’d think the canon would have been displaced as more and more information came along, but it hasn’t, really; it has only widened. I have spoken to young Deadheads who, surprisingly, respect the ancient judgments. “I’ll stick with May 8 because of its historical importance,” said Yona Koch-Feinberg, an 18-year-old from Manhattan. “That’s almost as important as the musical ability of the evening.”
The article is accompanied by a gallery of user-contributed photos from all eras of the band’s career. Awesome awesome. But, uh, books? Books. Yes, right. Okay. Well, my favorite book about The Grateful Dead is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure. I also really enjoyed Phil Lesh’s autobiography, Searching for the Sound. And of course, you need a copy of David Dodd’s Complete Annotated Grateful Dead lyrics, which overlaps quite a bit with but is not to be mistaken for or in any way replace Robert Hunter’s A Box of Rain: Collected Lyrics 1965-1993.
“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”
I feel like I just lived a week inside myself.
BONUS: Beckett on Beckett