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Announcement and Call for Submissions: The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature

Word on an exciting new project from Ben Segal:

Dear Internet,

We are very excited to announce the coming existence of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. The Catalog is to consist of a series of blurbs/short descriptions of books that do not exist. In order to compile that Catalog, we have asked many of the writers, theorists, and text-makers we most admire to imagine that they’ve just read the most amazing book they’ve ever encountered and then write a brief blurb about the imagined text.

As many of you know, The phrase ‘potential literature’ is highly associated with the Oulipo group. We choose to use the phrase here because, as the Oulipo says, their project, properly, is to conceptualize forms and potential works: not necessarily to bring them into being. Literature is potential literature when it is that shimmering non-work of total possibility. Though Official only by way of titular hyperbole (itself, like the blurbs contained within, a kind of unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise), the Catalog will evoke a library of wonderful–maybe even impossible–books; books that, in spite or even because of their non-existence, excite and fascinate. Each paragraph will be the promise of the unopened book in the moment before reading.

READ MORE >

Uncategorized / 27 Comments
May 7th, 2010 / 12:23 pm

Matthew Simmons

Writing Prompt: You’re Wrong, Emily Dickinson!

Music For Real Airports from The Black Dog on Vimeo.

An electronic group called The Black Dog thinks that Brian Eno got it wrong. So they have tried to rectify the problem.

In 1978, Brian Eno released an album called Music for Airports. It’s a classic, a sacred cow of ambient music, written by the man who coined the term for the genre. It’s also meant to be used by airports, intended to be played to help release the tensions of travel.

That doesn’t sit right with The Black Dog. They have responded with Music for Real Airports. From their press release: “”Airports have some of the glossiest surfaces in modern culture, but the fear underneath remains. Hence this record is not a utilitarian accompaniment to airports, in the sense of reinforcing the false utopia and fake idealism of air travel. Unlike Eno’s Music For Airports, this is not a record to be used by airport authorities to lull their customers.”

Here’s a task. Take a classic piece of writing. Decide what you think it intends to do. (A famous—and very simple—example: Candide intends to satirize Gottfried Leibniz’s optimism, that we live in the best of all possible worlds*.) Disagree with that. Even if you agree with it, find a way to disagree with it. Embrace the contrarian within.

Not the most original prompt, I admit. But a slight twist on it, I hope.

* And, yes. Voltaire misunderstood Leibniz.

Craft Notes / 10 Comments
May 7th, 2010 / 12:20 pm

Reviews

Guest Posts

Keith Lee Morris’ Fragile Men

Call it What You Want: Stories by Keith Lee Morris. Tin House Books. pp. 264, $14.95 list ($10.76 at the above-linked B&N.com).

Reviewed by Jennifer Bassett.

My first “real” writing class was in high school and taught by a young man who had just graduated from an MFA program. He was excited and passionate and on the first day of class he read us Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” from Jesus’ Son. We were all riveted. First of all, the story involved drugs (!) and secondly the writing was so sharp, it practically slit our wrists. For me, personally, that moment was particularly pivotal. Jesus’ Son and Johnson’s particular brand of writing—tough, honest, gritty, male, but with an undercurrent of boyish vulnerability—came to represent a standard by which I judged everything else.

Sequel to Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms
Forthcoming from Knopf

Ellis explores what disillusioned youth looks like 25 years later in this brutal sequel to Less Than Zero. Clay, now a screenwriter, returns at Christmas to an L.A. that looks and operates much as it did 25 years ago. Trent is now a producer and married to Clay’s ex, Blair, while Julian runs an escort service and Rip, Clay’s old dealer, has had so much plastic surgery he’s unrecognizable. While casting a script he’s written, Clay falls for a young, untalented actress named Rain Turner, and his obsession and affair with her powers him through an alcoholic haze that swirls with images of death, mysterious text messages, and cars lurking outside his apartment. The story takes on a creepy noirish bent–with Clay as the frightened detective who doesn’t really want to know anything–as it barrels toward a conclusion that reveals the horror that lies at the center of a tortured soul. Ellis fans will delight in the characters and Ellis’s easy hand in manipulating their fates, and though the novel’s synchronicity with Zero is sublime, this also works as a stellar stand-alone.

–from Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Author News / 39 Comments
May 7th, 2010 / 8:17 am

Matthew Simmons

You’re welcome.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unw8YYKYZPQ

If you—like me—went through that list of films Blake linked to earlier and said, “Man, I haven’t seen more than four or five of those,” then watch the above video. And then you’ve seen another!

I’m a fan of people who work with found footage so am happy to have been introduces to Peter Tscherkassky. The soundtrack on that piece is hypnotic.

Anyone else I should know about?

Web Hype / 8 Comments
May 6th, 2010 / 7:31 pm

Guest Posts

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front

[A poem by Wendell Berry, with compliments and hat-tips to Jeremy Schmall, Robert Snyderman, and everyone at the Corresponding Society. – JT]

“Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

14 eaters of itter leeps (stove smoke)

1. Holy fuck the WET cover gallery is the crystal bomb.

5. Are women writers really inferior? (This link blown-out so forget it. I’ll get the Francine Prose essay in later)

3. Percival Everett wins The Believer book award.

2. Fearlessly and courageously is the best way to break-up with anyone, eat boiled crayfish, write the first draft of a poem.

14. Wicked Aaron Burch/Lucy Corin discussion over EWN.

7. Best way to network is beer. If you don’t do beer, do softball. If you don’t do softball, survive something intense and dangerous together. If you can’t survive I and DT, try not to be an asshole, daily.

9. Bears.

Author News / 4 Comments
May 6th, 2010 / 4:49 pm

Adam Robinson

Film Comment Lists Films/Stephanie Barber

Film Comment has posted their “Avant-Garde Poll,” listing the best films and filmmakers of the last decade. Tied for #21 (I’m noting that the first 14 on the list of 50 are all men) is Stephanie Barber, whose book and DVD, these here separated to see how they standing alone or the soundtracks of six films by stephanie barber, will be available again from Publishing Genius in June.

That’s my favorite part of the list. There’s probably more to reflect upon. For instance, this Jim Trainor movie, which is fantastic:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZE_dBxM9IE&feature=related

Author Spotlight & Film / 2 Comments
May 6th, 2010 / 4:46 pm

Nick Antosca—

Alison Brie, one of my favorite actors on Mad Men (she plays Trudy, Pete’s wife) has a graphic and hilariously cheerful sex essay on Nerve. Wow, she’s… nothing like her character on the show.

Blake Butler