What to Wear During an Orange Alert?
One of my long-time favorite media-blogs Orange Alert has just relaunched with a new full on website, which makes me happy in the way of reading pleasure.
Orange Alert is unique in that they focus heavily not only on independent lit (with a weekley ‘Reader Meet Author’ feature that focuses specifically on small press peeps, including Giant folks like Sam Pink, Conor Madigan, Amelia Gray, Brandon Gorrell, and tons more), as well as weekly features on independent musicians, artists, and everything else all in one place. It’s a wonderful daily mishmash of new media, and in particular their ‘Watch List’ of things reading, watching, wanting, etc., is a good way to keep up with their favorite stories from online journals and new releases from small presses. It’s one of the things I look forward to reading each week.
Barry, Jereme and pr at the AWP: An Htmlgiant Original
"I love you, Jereme."
The day of trolling tables and tables in a convention center is over. It was fun, but now the real fun begins. We started drinking at dinner. Now, it is late. Like, two in the morning. We are all in a suite, in Blake Butler’s suite. Blake has a suite because he is famous. The light is dim and yellowish. Sounds of delicate laughter and glasses tinkling with booze abound. I am sitting on a couch, the windows behind me, but I can feel Chicago glittering below. Jereme is next to me. Sitting there on the couch, next to each other, it no longer matters that I have an Amazonian, East German discus thrower vibe to me, because when I am sitting, it hides that aspect of me (as opposed to standing). Being next to Jereme is like being next to warmth. Being next to Jereme is like wanting to hold a baby bird in my hands and I’m afraid I won’t do it right, because it is so delicate. But I want to, I want to do it right, I feel I’ve never wanted anything so badly in all my life. I also am afraid he might get angry at me and that would crush me. But everything is good. He is not angry. He has beautiful eyes. We are nicely drunk, not yet shit-faced and I haven’t blacked out yet. My right shoulder is touching Jereme’s left shoulder. I can smell him. He smells like cigars and whiskey and a man’s warmed skin. I have all this love flowing from me, from my chest, from where my heart is, toward Jereme. He lets me touch his beard. It is soft, the way longish beards are, not scratchy. It is thick and comforting. I stroke it with my hand. Then I lean in, and rub my cheek on his beard. This is what I am doing when Barry walks up to us, towering above us, interrupting our soft, kind moment.
“pr.”
“Yes?”
“That’s enough.”
New & Massive: The Rumpus
Schwartz is one of those writers who you’ve probably never heard of, and who, but for the dice of fate might just as easily have become a household name. USA Today named her first book of stories, Imagine a Great White Light, one of the best books of the year of 1991. (Actually, if you think about it, USA Today talking about a book of stories at all is amazing in and of itself–if it was tougher than a mountain-climb then, it’d probably take two miracles now.) Anyway, her debut novel, Lies Will Take You Somewhere–which in a just world would never have had to be described as “posthumous”–is out this month from Etruscan Press. In “What Happened To Sheila,” her husband Dan Chaon guides us through his wife’s life and works, and recounts for us the delightful story of their courtship, when he was “an undergraduate student, and she was a first time teacher, straight out of Stanford…” Chaon writes: “I know I’m only one of many of her students who fell madly in love with her, but I happened to be lucky.”
It’s an incredible story, and it seems to me emblematic of the kind of stellar, unique work that The Rumpus is committed to publishing, so after you click over there and read it, click back over this way and read my Q&A with editor Stephen Elliott, which you can find right after the jump. We talk about the impetus for founding the site, what’s missing from the mainstream blogosphere, and the challenges that promising web-projects like his (and ours!) face and how to overcome them or die trying. Plus, you know, other awesome stuff too.
The Daily Undertaker
Angel of Death
I am someone who wakes up every morning and touches my own face, shocked and in awe of my simple aliveness. Why me? Why do I get to be alive? The answer to that question doesn’t matter, the awe does. I am so happy for my short time on this planet and constantly aware that – poof- it will be over. So my gratitude and joy live side by side with death. I am, like most of us, death haunted.
Patrick McNally’s blog, The Daily Undertaker, presents all sorts of different ways of thinking and dealing with death. He takes things from his experience as a funeral director in Wisconsin, but also mixes it up with the personal and the literary. There are posts quoting Charles Bukowski (linked here) as well as fascinating discussions on new techniques of burial, the most notable to me being promession (linked here), in which the body of the deceased is prepared for the earth in a way that enables it to compost properly as opposed to just rot. There are some lighthearted moments as well, as in this post where he discusses some of the more eccentric ways in which people can handle the remains of loved ones:
Magic Helicopter Press Seeks Pilots
I posted this at the NOÖ blog, but wanted to post here as well.
Mike and I will have a remote control mini-helicopter at AWP. We will raffle this helicopter off to a lucky AWP-goer. If you’d like to enter your name in the raffle, come by our table (we’ll be sharing with Publishing Genius Press and No Colony), donate some money or buy one of our Magic Helicopter Press chapbooks, and we’ll enter you in the drawing.
In the meantime, we’ll be flying the helicopter around the bookfair, demonstrating our skillz, etc.
Here is a video of the helicopter doing what helicopters do. When you watch the video, imagine lots of authors in that room, sweating and being scared; that is what AWP will be like:
Of course, if Black Warrior Review hands out those fly-swatters they had in Atlanta, then we might be in trouble.
Friggin Winter
Here are two things I like a lot about FRiGG, which is edited by Ellen Parker:
1) It always looks amazingly ornate. Each issue flings these full color graphics at you for every author’s page. I think this is a smart way to be an online magazine in a different way than we normally imagine. Normally we think online lends itself to streamlined, simple, a few solid colors. Sure, that makes sense. But FRiGG’s approach also makes sense because you couldn’t do this lavish kind of stuff in print; it would be too expensive, right? Yes. And then the paintings are smart enough to recede into the background for the text, which is just a very simple black on white. I feel like there is a curator’s sense of individual-by-individual care that goes into presenting all the authors, and that’s great.
2) FRiGG seems aware that people don’t usually want to read 2000+ word stories on the Web, but they publish some anyway, and usually the ones they publish seem smart in their length: broken up cleverly or chasing you with enough line-by-line momentum that you forget the idea of eye strain and read the whole thing. I think this is terrific editorial shrewdness.
All of which is to introduce FRiGG’s new issue, which features stories and poems from: Joshua Ben-Noah Carlson, Louie Crew, Barry Graham, Crystal J. Hoffman, Tiff Holland, Paul Hostovsky, Dennis Mahagin, Ravi Mangla, Mary Miller, Suzanne Ondrus, Jennifer Pieroni, and Katy Whittingham. Peek it now.
Tao Lin reveals American Apparel sponsorship a hoax
Tao lin reveals today that American Apparel has not actually sponsored Reader of Depressing Books:
1/22/2009
just kidding re 1/19/2009 post
*a rare opportunity to display your career management skills* in terms of my career as an author of literary fiction should i have put american apparel ads on my blog without getting paid by american apparel and then made a blog post saying american apparel had sponsored me and then changed my facebook status to ‘american apparel sponsored me: [link to the 1/19/2009 post]’? answer yes or no then elaborate using 120 words or less in the comments section *a rare opportunity to display your career management skills*
For those of you who missed the original post, which only went up on 1/19, it’s here:
In any case, the ads are still up, down the whole right sie of his blog. These ads feature famous hot teen existentialism-espousing BDSM-positive borderline-mainstream-personality-now pornstar Sasha Grey, who seemed to be mostly adveristing her own tits, which, frankly, are much more appealing than whatever that high-waisted garment covering her lower half is. And I would just like to say, for the record, that I was totally taken in by this hoax, (1) because why would anyone pretend to be sponsored by something when they’re not? (answer: seek not to comprehend the ways of Tao, etc) and (2) because of this Jezebel post that went up on the 20th, which didn’t mention Tao at all but might as well have, and I guess might actually have if his story had actually been true. Anyway, I was going to put together a little portfolio of Sasha Grey pictures to celebrate this not-actual-collision-of-worlds, but then I decided that all the really interesting photos of her are too graphic–even for a NSFW-work-tagged post, which the Jezebel post is but this one actually isn’t. So if you want to know what the deal is, turn your Google Safe Search all the way off and don’t say I didn’t warn you slash don’t forget to thank me. Or Tao. You know, whatever.
Paper Egg Books welcomes you to the nest
Aaron Burch reminded me that I had posted about Paper Egg Books a while ago, and he said new things are going on over there, things everyone ought to check out.
So I checked it out and am now out $50. That’s right, a 3yr subscription to Paper Egg Books will cost you $50 but guarantees that you’ll receive two books a year for the next three years. I like that idea.
So, goodbye, Ulysses S. Grant. Hello Paper Egg Books.
Paper Egg has also announced a few things that make me excited about my 3yr subscription. Because I am lazy, I have simply copied and pasted from their website the following two ‘press releases’:
The Great Paul Hornschemeier, he of the prodigious illustrative talents and author of numerous fantastic Fantagraphics books, will illustrate and design every edition of Paper Egg. As much as this little effort is something of a throwback, we wanted to embrace the old-school methods of having each Paper Egg contain similar design elements, so that as you line them up on your shelves year after year, they begin to amass a sort of group mind. To that end, Paul will work closely with featherproof design guru Zach Dodson to create our new line of books. And, of course, Paul will illustrate each Egg.
Really, we couldn’t have found a finer artist for the job, as Paul has done some incredible book design work in the past, and each of his own books—including Mother, Come Homeand The Three Paradoxes—combines all that we love in art: a technician’s eye, an impish sense of humor, and enough melancholy mixed in that we can never quite set our compass right.
If you’re not acquainted with Paul’s work, please, please acquaint yourself.
And:
So now that you know what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, it’s time to tell you what we have in store. For our first Paper Egg, we’ll be sending you The Awful Possibilities by Christian Tebordo. It’s Christian’s first collection of short stories, and anyone who’s familiar with his past work knows it’s got to be dark, beautiful, strange, and the kind of book that opens new doors with every page turned.
A little background: I’m lucky enough to hold off the bill collectors with my job as the editor of Time Out Chicago’s Books section. When Christian’s first novel, The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck came across my desk in 2005, I was blown away. I had one of those nights where I didn’t fall asleep until a couple of hours before work, when the book was finally done. Since then, he’s followed it up with Better Ways of Being Dead (awesome) and We Go Liquid (amazing). So when we decided to launch Paper Egg, it was obvious to me that we should to start off right with a book from Christian. In fact, in some sense, Paper Egg was designed to publish Christian’s book. It’s brilliant, and strange, and the mammoth bookselling network is simply not suited for something like it. We’re hoping we are.
To read a great Ned Vizzini interview with Christian, go here, and one of his stories at La Petite Zine.
I am going to go check my mailbox now. While I’m gone, why don’t you visit their website, see how it works, and then subscribe.