Last May, Blake posted a short meditation on video game art, particularly Jason Rohrer’s Passage, and how the constraints Rohrer and others write under can create new experiences in video games. If you liked that post, consider watching Simon Cottee‘s pixel art documentary, which explores how and why the pixel style has moved beyond indie video games and into visual art, music, and so on. Makes me miss my NES.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mqAZ06dwKU
Pindeldyboz, a site which I read regularly and aspired to publish on early in my discovery of the vibrant online lit scene, is shutting down. Thanks for everything, Whitney and gang.
I’m going to become a millionaire when I invent an invisible, self-directed, ambulatory device that slaps people’s stock phrases right out of their mouths. (Even mine. Especially mine.) “At this point in time.” “To be completely honest.” I had a crazy boss who would always ask for the “quick and dirty version” of something or the “soup to nuts version” of it. That was kind of entertaining, though.
My creature will look like Big Dog, except invisible and with a smacking hand.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHJJQ0zNNOM
Please keep her always drunk.
I don’t do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.
I’m through with the whole works.
An unbroken night of sleep is rare.
Oh, misty-minded.
Four be the things I’d have been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
Sobriety? A basis for jokes.
Ballin in the library.
She’s probably on her way to get a bottle of bad gin.
I’m not down to my last two bits.
A deep human need to complain.
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
And down a beer.
A couple nights ago, I went to this experimental improv music thing in Toronto, which was all sorts of interesting, but that’s really neither here nor there. During intermission, this irrelevant artist was showing off to a friend of mine about his most recent publication, which was about, get this: the ellipsis.
He made the argument that the ellipsis gives readers authority over both text and author, they can “fill in” what the writer “left out.” Unfortunately, he didn’t think I was “anyone,” so he never engaged me in conversation, more or less just looked at me like I was a moron, if anything. But he made an impassioned argument to my friend about the ellipsis gives the reader control, let’s them take back the text from the author-narrator, that anything can happen within those three little dots.
Whereas I didn’t pick a fight with this guy then—I was tired, it was hot, the show was in an old church for Christ’s sake—I can pick one with him now, online, where I’m safe.
Ellipsis: The omission of one or more words in a sentence, which would be needed to complete the grammatical construction or fully to express the sense (OED).
You missed Sam’s live reading but you can pick up his new book, The Ask, now. And you best.
A few more prizes (stuff from Juked, Artifice Magazine, Future Tense Books, Melville House, and Muumuu House) have been added to the prize packages for our 20 Under 40 Pick ‘Em Contest. The deadline to enter is 11:59pm on June 1st.
Ok, the book length interview was interesting, and the uncompleted final novel in near-form makes sense (and is compelling, even in its incompleteness), but this, this, is exploitation, and a bad idea:
Columbia University Press is publishing David Foster Wallace’s undergrad thesis next year? [more info at GalleyCat].
Undergrad thesis? I’m sorry, I love the man, and I am interested in marginalia of great minds, but this to me seems not only too much, but just incorrect. Undergrad papers, particularly ones called things like Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, are almost always embarrassing, and even if they have some merit, don’t really belong in a body of work, unless, you know, the author is alive and willing to OK that thing to come into the world. It hadn’t cropped up since his college years for a reason.
Though I am sure I will purchase and read it (as seems their point here), I think this is a big shame on you waiting to happen. God knows if anyone ever saw what I wrote as undergrad I’d want a fork in the eye, even if I was gone. I can’t imagine that there are many who wouldn’t. Clearly, from the design of the cover of this, these people have no taste. Let a man rest.
In three hours I will own a house. There will be a room to write in. A word space of my own. There will be books in this room and a big blue French farmhouse table. There will be a comfortable chair and sunlight. The sounds of birds outside the window. A big hawk’s nest in the tree above. There will be college students next door, and sometimes I will think about how new their lives are as I write, how unformed creatures begin to take form and find shape. There will be coffee. I will make lamps out of the glass jars I’ve been collecting for a year. I will live alone with my pets in this house. At night, it will be quiet, and sometimes I will cherish the silence.
Sometimes I’ll wonder what I’m doing there in my new writing room, all the luxury of selfhood skating away.
Sometimes I’ll be afraid.
What scares you about writing?