On Influence: ‘DOOM, DOOM, DOOM!’
I was at a reading end of last year or sometime, this guy, reading words on paper, talked between the things he’d written previously, to explain the things he’d written previously, though in a way so that the lead-ins were way better than the things themselves, making me huddle in the head some for the idea of making words, at least in there.
Word schools. “My father was a steel man: me, I’m in syllables, ones that don’t quite say.”
Me too, me too, I’m sure.
Regardless, during one of these monologues between glossies the dude said something about how when he teaches fresh writing students, the first thing he tells ’em is how they have to get out of the mode of imitating what they love. How they needed to stop trying to mimic other writers in the mind of ‘using their own voice.’
I seriously had to grab my pitching arm from grabbing a book off the shelf of the store the reading was in and lobbing it at dude’s head.
I bit my mouth and forgot about it for a while, so I could get out without hemorrhage.
All this acting as a lead-in for the real post I wanted to post, my current favorite viral video of the month:
Mos Def in admiration for his man the MF Doom
Magic begets magic, like how I get up any day at all, maybe.
Those ones that make you glow.
HTMLGiant Readin’
Come out. See people read. See this person live. See this person live, too. See the person who wrote this live. See Kevin Sampsell host. (See me.) See all this in Portland.
The next night, see a variation of this in Seattle. Add this person with the glasses to the line up. Subtract the pidgeon guy.
PAY NOTHING FOR BOTH events! Except maybe if you buy books.
Also, BUY BOOKS. This top book, maybe.
These Are Not Divergences They Are Where You Mean to Go
The trailer for Kathryn Regina‘s chapbook forthcoming from Greying Ghost is enough to make you cry.
Ingrid Burrington is an artist and writer in Baltimore, MD. Her work is pithy and remarkable. Check out this frames gag.
Nathan Leslie nails tone in “Pickle Man,” his story in the new JMWW.
If you care about chapbooks, what if you were in NYC on April 23-25 and went to this conference, called “A Celebration of the Chapbook“?
Via Chris Higgs, here is Ad-Art by Steve Lambert, a Firefox plug-in that replaces online ads with art. Will this development ruin online publishing?
I received HTML Giant-owned Chelsea Martin’s book Everything Was Fine Until Whatever from Future Tense this weekend. It’s amazing. Here’s a rad video (*I updated this link to the Noo Journal one I just watched, which is newer*).
Baseball season is now upon us, and accordingly Hobart released their annual baseball issue yesterday. In Simon Smith’s “Man’s Man,” an overzealous pinch-runner shoulda held at third. It’s literally mind-blowing.
Do link round-ups work in this Web 2.0 era, or are they more pre-embeddable video?
Tattoo Madness (a guest missive from the Tyrant)
A report on the way in from way out from Master Giancarlo DiTrapano:
Ah ha ha ha ha. You have GOT to be kidding me. After smoking a joint with my coffee this morning, I began to cruise around Facebook (I feel like less of a loser when I Facebook stoned). That’s when I came across this absolute JEWEL of a tattoo. Just look at it. Behold it….
First, I thought it was a joke. Not only is it the title (altered slightly) of a David Eggers book, but it is the title of his absolute worst one. Now, Eggers has written a cool thing or two, I will admit. And he helps all the kids learn to write with irony and stuff at those 666 places. I even once read a nice paragraph that Eggers wrote. The thing is, just never two in a row. I think that’s his style though. Modulation sells. Wait, back to the tattoo: Is this tattoo supposed to be funny? I’m going to go out on a limb here and recommend that we all think to ourselves that it is. For if the reality is that it is not supposed to be funny, then the sad marring of this heavenly sculpted back is certain to overtake me on this first real beautiful day of spring in New York City.
To be fair, here are my tattoos. Laugh away.
So who else has the lit tattoo or whatnot? Let’s have a hear at it?
Anyone who happens to be a part of Shelley Jackson’s SKIN who emails me gets both issues of No Colony free.
Baltimore Scene Report
Shana Moulton
The Transmodern Festival is in its sixth year, and has become one of the best arts festivals in the country. Even the Washington Post says so. The four day event focuses on experimental/radical/challenging performance, so even after attending for the last four years (and curating last year), the things that happen are still surprising. READ MORE >
Please God, Let This Be Real.
Hello. By now you should understand my schtick here on HTMLGIANT (and abroad!) but there is no hyperbole necessary to display to you the awesomeness that is THIS.
It is my job to come up with a SNARKY COMMENT, but…I…can’t.
Okay…just one. I fear posting about this because when I see HTML coding like that, it makes me think of the Heaven’s Gate website (they were webdesigners, you know…I’m being totally serious…THANKS FOR RUINING THE NIKE CORTEZ FOR US APPLEWHITE!) and I’m scared that they’re going to find me and carve a poorly assembled chapbook with no central theme with the exception of ‘SPACE!’ into my chest and how am I going to explain that the next time I am with a woman?
In other words, bodybackground=”#FEFDD6″ FONT-FAMILY: MSCOMICSANS scares the shit out of me.
So enjoy(?)
Hoax Followup, in Brief
Now that April Fool’s Day is past, I just want to take a minute and thank Cave Canem, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tao Lin for all being such good sports about my “Tao Lin Wins Cave Canem First Book Prize” post from yesterday. It was, of course, complete nonsense. As Cave Canem’s executive director, Alison Meyers, rightly pointed out in our comments section: the deadline for the Cave Canem Prize isn’t even until April 30th, so there was really no way this could possibly be true (I mean on top of all the other reasons it couldn’t be and also isn’t true).
John K, on his blog J’s Theater, thought the post was generally clever, which I appreciate, but he also felt that “the fake quotes attributed to Komunyakaa are indefensable…” He’s probably right about that, so I’ve gone ahead and added an “UPDATE: APRIL FOOLS'” to the top of the post, just so future Google-searchers don’t get the wrong idea. John K also felt that I took “a backhanded swipe at last year’s CC First Book Prize submittees and black poets in general…” Let me state for the record that no swipes were intended, backhanded or otherwise, I just read on the Cave Canem site that no prize was awarded in 2008, and improvised from there.
In an age of instant verification, a little extra creativity (and deceit) is called for, hence the superficially “logical” but basically insane quotes from Komunyakaa, who himself was only chosen for “quotation” because he happens to be judging the prize this year. (Hardcore Tao Lin fans may have noted that the purported title of his book, “Organic Cold-pressed Virgin Coconut Oil,” was a longer poem he was working on a few years ago. Parts of it were published in Agriculture Reader #2. He later abandoned the project.)
As for why I chose Cave Canem, it’s because they’re an eminently respectable publication and organization whose results for this year’s prize haven’t yet been announced. Plus their website had enough information on it for me to construct a semi-credible story in the time-frame I had (the one actually true part of the post, is that I slung it together in the half hour before I had to go teach my two sections of 101). Anyway, once more, with feeling: many thanks to all involved, especially the unwitting. Maybe next year we’ll announce that Nathaniel Mackey has won the FENCE Alberta Prize. Until then, cheers!
What they said about what we said
In the fall last year, a +3000 page pdf titled “Issue 1” was published featuring +3000 writers/poets by For Godot, a glorified blog. There was a catch: 1) the poems were never submitted/solicited, 2) the poems were not authored by the cited writer (instead generated by an online algorithm) and 3) no editorial correspondence preceded the publication. In short, this was more about the conceptual, probably satirical, musings of the ‘editors,’ and less about the content of the publication. I smell commentary.
Tao Lin wins Cave Canem First Book Prize & I talk to Prize Judge Yusef Komunyakaa
********UPDATE: APRIL FOOLS’********
The announcement isn’t up on their site yet, but after I heard from the source himself, I called Yusef Komunyakaa–who is judging the contest this year–and asked for clarification. “I wish you wouldn’t post about this conversation,” Komunyakaa said, “but I’m not telling you that you can’t. Anyway, if you don’t break the story, one of our interns–or Tao’s–is probably going to.”
Here’s a bit of info about the Cave Canem prize:
Established in 1999, this first book award is dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts by African American poets. The participation of distinguished judges and prominent literary presses has made this prize highly competitive.
As you can see, this is an incredibly audacious choice for Komunyakaa and Cave Canem to have made, since Tao Lin is neither a first-book author or an African American. “We thought about that,” Komunyakaa told me, “but after last year, when the judge declined to even award the prize, I thought it was time to shake things up. If Tao Lin had the courage to unironically enter a contest for which he was entirely unqualified at every conceivable level, then maybe we should try and reward that courage, as a message to other young African American writers out there.”
I asked Komunyakka if it had occurred to him that perhaps Lin’s entry was not, in fact, unironic at all. “Yes, that did occur to me,” he said. “Some people on the Graywolf board were especially concerned about this, but I finally just said, ‘Listen, what does it matter? A good book is a good book, and this kid’s stuff actually sells.’ It’s the name of our prize–and your press–that will be on the cover of his book, which we expect he will promote with the same machine-like relentlessness that is his trademark–which of course is how he ended up entering our contest in the first place. I said to them, ‘you want to see Cold-Pressed Organic Virgin Coconut Oil come out with that little Melville House logo on the spine instead of your wolves, be my guest. But this is the book I’m writing an introduction for.’
I’m a little baffled by all this, but I have to go start preparing for teaching this afternoon, so I can’t really give this thing the attention it deserves, but anyway, congrats, I guess.
Previous winners of the Cave Canem Prize include Major Jackson, Natasha Tretheway, and Tracy K. Smith. Tao Lin finds himself, as usual, in good company.
Today at the Daily Rumpus: Useful Additions to D.T. Max’s “The Unfinished”
Rumpus regular Elissa Bassist offers up “Notes and Errata: A DFW Companion Guide to ‘The Unfinished’ by D.T. Max.” (I think we reported on the Max piece when it first came out, but anyone needing a refresher can get one here.) Basically, her piece catalogues any DFW work, interviews, or otherwise relevant points of reference in Max’s piece and, if that work or parts of it are available anywhere online, she links to it. Por ejemplo:
5. “Anything comforting put him on guard. ‘It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,’ he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State.”
6. “The critic James Wood* cited Infinite Jest as representative of the kind of fiction dedicated to the ‘pursuit of vitality at all costs.’”
*Two pertinent links: Book Review: James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self, by Nigel Beale(the quotation “pursuit of vitality at all costs” is given context here); Remembering David Foster Wallace (Wood’s comment is last)
Thanks for the good work, Elissa! I’m sure putting something like this together was tedious and time-consuming, but there are a lot of people out there who will be grateful you took the time to do it.