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Meet Adam Gallari

Adam Gallari is an American ex-pat currently working on a novel and pursuing a PhD at the University of Exeter. His essays and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming from numerous outlets, including The Quarterly Conversation, Fifth Wednesday Journal, therumpus.net, TheMillions.com, anderbo.com and The MacGuffin. I recently read his muted but elegant debut short story collection, We Are Never As Beautiful We Are Now, and talked with Adam about his writing, living and studying abroad, baseball and much much more. Meet Adam Gallari.

You’re pursuing your Ph.D. in England. What compelled you to head across the Atlantic to continue your higher education? What are you studying? What’s Exeter like? Have you adopted a British accent? Is the writer’s life different in England?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with European culture and history and literature. There’s so much to explore in it, and there’s a great weight that informs it. I’ve always wanted to find a way to live either on the continent or the British Isles for a protracted period of time to be able to immerse myself in everything, and after I returned to American from Germany to get my masters I figured the first chance I had to go back there I would. A PhD seemed like the next logical step for me as far as my “career” was concerned, so I tried to combine the two and so far it’s managed to work out.

As far as the PhD, I’m pursuing it in English and currently trying to narrow down my dissertation, but at the moment it’s tending towards an exploration of the works of the Norwegian Novelist Per Petterson in the greater context of American work. His protagonists many to be both existentialist and realist at the same time; I’d compare it to Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, but I think that ultimately that’s too much of a simplification of the whole thing.

Call for Subs?

If a 167,000 pound box couldn’t stop the hemorrhage, what can? A poem to ease the flow:

Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the Gulf Oil Disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions.

Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.

If you would like to submit work for consideration, please send 1-3 poems, a short bio, and credits for any previously published submissions to: poetsforlivingwaters@yahoo.com

Editors: Amy King & Heidi Lynn Staples

Uncategorized / 10 Comments
May 21st, 2010 / 2:00 pm

Matthew Simmons

Reality Hunger: A conversation

I enjoyed Reality Hunger. Blake, not so much. We had an email conversation about it. Here it is.

M: So, I gave you my galley of Reality Hunger, and saw this on your Twitter feed: “fairly underwhelmed by ‘reality hunger’ — what’s so innovative about making a list of things praising innovation?” I’m not sure that’s what I thought I was reading, though—a list of praise for innovation. I think I read an argument for the synthesizing of creative disciplines. Nonfiction and fiction, say, ingesting one another—two snakes swallowing one another whole, beginning at one another’s tail. And the thesis, antithesis, synthesis structure feels less linear to me than the word “list” implies.

B: You’re correct, it’s not quite just a list of praise for innovation–though quite a bit of the book repeats something along those lines of the ingesting as you mention, and does it again, again, again. And it’s certainly not untrue: fiction, or any writing, must continually evolve, for fear of that same pattern of repetition, or at the very least no longer being interesting, or “relevant,” which I think was Mr. Shields’s major point. People get bored. Times change. Sure. My problem with the book, though, is that, well, OF COURSE. Of course things will keep changing, and of course there will be those who feign against it, making more of the same, and that in the end leads to the demise of the interest, and the morph continues etc. These are things we know.
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Uncategorized / 110 Comments
May 21st, 2010 / 1:18 pm

Matthew Simmons—

On Dennis Cooper’s blog, there’s a really great collection of videos and quotes about “hypnagogic pop.”

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Sean Lovelace

It is Friday: Go Right Ahead

I was sitting in another bar with the Mexican who spoke English.

The world is deluged with tranquilizers and energy drinks.

Birds, please assemble!

And I was unreal to the others.

To the drinker as well as the drunk.

I found myself spanking a tequila.

But you got it? Yes, I got it.

thhraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggggggggggh

Thermodynamic SHOW-Down.

“That’s a problem,” she said.

Things could start crumbling fast now.

Ha Ha.

Random / 5 Comments
May 21st, 2010 / 11:36 am

Ryan Call

The HTMLGIANT 20 Under 40 Pick ‘Em Contest

Last week The New York Observer reported that on June 7th The New Yorker will name the top twenty American writers under forty, and we’d like to celebrate this really incredibly important event in the history of American letters by running a free March Madness-style Pick ‘Em contest for you HTMLGIANT readers. If you’d like to enter, all you have to do is email to htmlgiant [at] htmlgiant [dot] com your list of the twenty authors you think The New Yorker will select as “the key writers of this generation.” Then we all wait with baited breath until The New Yorker publishes their list! The top three entrants who have the most picks that correctly match the names on The New Yorker list will each receive a prize package. Should you wish to pay an ‘entry fee,’ please consider making a donation to any of the presses/publishers/people who have put up swag for the prize package; however, there is no requirement for an entry fee.

Details after the jump.

Violin Hating: Nerd Fight

A few months ago, I was on this really big nerdy Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto kick, and I listened to more versions of the piece than I’m comfortable mentioning, usually one after another like crack. Somewhere along the way, I found out about the Tchaikovsky Competition, which led me to a goldmine of translations of the concerto. Well, you know YouTube works, and one click led to another, until I’d watched all the finalists for the competition during its various stages.

A few years ago, Mayuko Kamio won. Here is an excerpt of one of the stages of the competition. It would seem as though everyone had to play Waxman’s Carmen Fantasy, which I don’t particularly care for, I much prefer Sarasate’s version, but whatever.

Her interpretation of Waxman is problematic, sure. Think what you will about her playing, what I care about most is how people responded in the comments section. They’re brutal. Most of them seem to have a working knowledge about music, though they’re probably not actually musicians. Many of them are racist. At least no one was blatantly sexist.