—

1. Incredible post by Derek White on “travel writing,” specifically Crawford, Zornoza, and Lopez.
2. If it’s not already, Kate Zambreno’s blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister should be in your feed. A feast.
3. This $10k for disappearing challenge sounds like the one to sign up for.

12

Michael Kimball Guest Lecture #2: Keeping Going

So let’s say we have a great opening and maybe even a good idea or an interesting voice to go with it. Now what? How does the writer keep going? One of the things that has helped me keep going while I’m working on a novel is not thinking about it. That is, I try to not think about what I’m writing when I’m getting it down (the thinking, so to speak, comes later). For me, it’s just a voice speaking, a way of talking, and I’m trying to be receptive to it, open. I’m just trying to get from one sentence to the next sentence. Often, I do this by looking at the previous sentence—its syntax, the words in play, the acoustics of it—I’m thinking in these small ways, but not so much in bigger ways (say, story or plot or idea). I’m just trying to get material down, which is the hardest part for me. After that, after I have something to work with, then I feel like I can do something with whatever I have on the page. It’s the blankness that is difficult for me, filling in the blankness.

Here are some quotes from Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz, Joseph Young, and Blake Butler that discuss a similar process in somewhat different ways.

READ MORE >

Craft Notes / 78 Comments
February 4th, 2010 / 4:54 pm

Artifice Magazine #1

New magazine Artifice, out of Chicago, has just published their first issue, with new work by many radicals, including myself and our own Roxane Gay:

Carol Berg – Jessica Bozek – Blake Butler – Neil de la Flor – Andrew Farkas – Ori Fienberg – Elisa Gabbert – Kelly Haramis – Roxane Gay – Kyle Hemmings – Tim Jones-Yelvington – Gregory Lawless – Jefferson Navicky – Lance Olsen – Joel Patton – Christopher Phelps – Derek Philips – Cynthia Reeser – Kathleen Rooney – Davis Schneiderman – Maureen Seaton – David Silverstein – Susan Slaverio – Kristine Snodgrass – William Walsh

Featuring:

Koalas, terror, that one time you watched your father boil lobsters, infidelity, faithful robots, faithless robot dogs, compromising situations, and at least one missing body.

In the spirit, they have offered to give away three free issues to HTMLGiant readers.

All you have to do is looking at their submission wishlist, which lists the kind of stuff they are looking to publish, and make a suggestion of something to add to that list. Examples are: # 1 piece you’d tell a child not to put in their mouth, # 3 halves of a story, # 1 game code that unlocks a secret level. Comment with your suggestion and 3 winners will be picked tomorrow afternoon.

In the meantime, consider picking up an issue, and/or sending your work!

[P.S. This is the 3000th post at HTMLGiant. Weird.]

Contests / 133 Comments
February 4th, 2010 / 3:03 pm

The Postman’s Mother by Megan Savage

The postman has never penned a letter. Not on paper. For the postman a letter has always been a prayer sent upward from head to heaven. He has also never left home. Now, Mother rests abed, breath labored, bedsores hot. For supper, he serves her mashed potatoes and coleslaw, and afterwards he reads from Pearl S. Buck.

— from “The Postman’s Mother” by Megan Savage, published in Spork, 2006

There are no letter “i”s in this piece, a convincing nod to George Perec’s A Void, which I find very impressive. Try to write just one sentence like this; it is very difficult. This was originally published in 2006, but deserves a fresher read. Read the rest here.

Author Spotlight / 10 Comments
February 4th, 2010 / 2:30 pm

Long Song Cave


The Song Cave is a chapbook press run by poets Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Each chapbook comes in editions of 100, is signed, and contains a “single poem in a single volume.” Their latest release comes from Ben Lerner.

Make sure to check out available past editions from Cyrus Console and Amanda Nadelberg and keep an eye on this press in the future. What they have coming is new light.

Presses / 18 Comments
February 4th, 2010 / 12:07 pm

Group Effort #2 Results

It’s fitting that the author of the book that inspired my new favorite tv show should appear in this piece, particularly due to his “abiding hatred” for the blogosphere.  Thanks to all who participated. in the second installment of Group Efforts!

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS [REDUX]

We are goober. We are brontosaurus. In the back of a car, we are dumb luck.
We drink our quiet through a straw and piss whispers behind the neighbor’s shed.
Sometimes, when we are sleeping, ferns the size of houses make us cry. Not because we are sad. But because they are beautiful. And we are hungry.
*They,* however, have shown no interest in us or our activities. For that we are grateful, though not a little bemused.
Was it not they who, after considerable wining and dining, sold us on moving here?
Did they not offer our sons their daughters? We must be vigilant, lest we be unmoored.
[Our parents have no idea! Even though we are so close to home! They never know we are hungry! They never think we are asleep!]
And so one night we wake, the hunger in our heads spilling out like lantern light at last.
We shake our daughters from sleep and dress them, lacing their toe shoes and lowering their tulle veils. We tiptoe down the courtyard, past our full and sleeping parents, and lead our dancing daughters to their bridal feast.
Our greed is a moonslice on the gravel.
[I saw Buzz Bissinger in Pittsburgh. He sounds a lot like Lewis Black. Called a guy who asked a dumb, confrontational question a “fuckhead.” I like Buzz Bissinger a good deal.]
“Oh, woe!” cried the sisters. The tulle-veiled, toe-shoed, whispering fern-dream sisters. “We don’t like Pittsburgh! And we don’t like Lewis Black! Please don’t make us marry him! He sprays spittle! Every time he speaks!”
*Please don’t make us…
I read that Buzz Bissinger hung himself the next day. He didn’t even leave a note.
Just a birthday card from his mother. The card was three weeks late and did not even make a joke of its own belatedness. I doubt the sisters read the newspaper. I know *they* don’t. Our parents don’t read at all.

Random / 6 Comments
February 4th, 2010 / 12:05 pm

The Middle Path

Robert Cohen has a new piece worth reading called “Going to the Tigers: Notes on Middle Style” now up at The Believer.

Ultimately, I disagree with Cohen because to my mind he’s implicitly recuperating the old Aristotelian virtues we know so well from Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, in order to illustrate his point about the value of avoiding both excess and deficiency. What seals my disagreement is this statement:

Reading a novel that feels overly finessed, not quite visceral, makes us antsy and peevish. Enough with the light show, we think, enough with the incense, the dry ice, the elaborate riddles and evasions. No wonder people hate novels.

For one thing, I disagree with his use of first person plural. It makes “us” antsy? “We” think? Really? You’re gonna make a claim that you know what reading an overly finessed, not quite visceral novel makes me feel? That’s bonkers. And point of fact, I almost exclusively (and purposefully) read works that strive for light shows, incense, dry ice, elaborate riddles and evasions. I’m being serious. That’s why I attend to literature: for the spectacle.

But before I skin my tongue, I’ll leave it there. Take a gander. Seems like something that might/could spark some conversation.

Uncategorized / 120 Comments
February 3rd, 2010 / 11:34 pm
—

“He died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless, elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.” An excerpt from Gilbert Sorrentino’s posthumous novel The Abyss of Human Illusion at The Brooklyn Rail.

24

Hidden behind the buzz: Leon Botha


Hidden behind the buzz around this wonderfully strange—and slickly produced—band called Die Antwoord is the inclusion in this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc3f4xU_FfQ

of an artist named Leon Botha. Botha is one of the oldest living persons in the world with a condition called Progeria. He’s 24 but he appears to be in his 80s.

The two vocalists in Die Antwoord have done some work to make themselves as visually arresting as their costar—the severe and unflattering haircuts, the poor needle and ink tattoos on the man, the peroxide on the hair and eyebrows of the woman—but they can only achieve so much. Botha steals the attention of the viewer. And what I like most about this is that I think Botha wants that. He wants to be seen. But how many will notice him behind the catchy music, funny haircuts, and—interesting, I’ll admit—artifice of Die Antwoord? Some attention to him is paid after the cut.
READ MORE >

Web Hype / 41 Comments
February 3rd, 2010 / 8:04 pm

2 STORIES

Wow, I just read the Bolaño story in the most recent New Yorker—it’s here, and it’s called “William Burns”–and I loved it.  First anything by Bolaño that I’ve loved.  I had very mixed feelings about 2666.  But this was great.  It kind of reminded me of a Ligotti story, with the degrees of distance from the narrator, the surreal dread, the shifting perceptions of the source of danger, and the dreamlike progression.  It feels like transcribed dream, which is of particular interest to me at the moment.

Similarly, I’m loving I. Fontana’s “UB” at Spork, just as I loved the Jean Harlow story from a while back.  I’m interested in anything Fontana writes these days; he knows what he’s doing.

Uncategorized / 8 Comments
February 3rd, 2010 / 7:28 pm