httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-0xDa4-fi0
And yet another (of the transfinite number) reason to live in New York.
Six-Word Memoir on NPR
Since I missed the live broadcast, I’ve been waiting all damn day for NPR to post today’s “Talk of the Nation,” and now they have! Today’s show features a segment with homegirl-in-chief Rachel Fershleiser and guy-I’ve-met-a-couple-times-who-seems-cool-too Larry Smith, who are talking about their massively successful series of Six-Word Memoir books, the newest of which is It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs from Writers Famous and Obscure. These books have become so big and so ubiquitous over the past few years that I think it’s easy to forget what a coup their success represents–the project was developed on the indie webzine Smithmag.net, and even after getting picked up by Harper Perennial (disclosure: also my publisher, blah blah blah) thrived in large part due to Fershleiser’s and Smith’s tireless hands-on DIY ethos, their willingness to throw countless events all across the country, and their ability to stimulate the continued interest, support and attention of thousands of contributors. None of which are remotely easy things to do once, much less over and over. So a hearty cheers to Rachel and Larry, and to the many NPR listeners who called in from all over the country during the segment to share their own six-word memoirs, especially Shelby the lunch lady from Lacrosse, Wisconsin: “The hairnet. Now we are equal.”
Matt Bell—
From Michael Rudin’s “Writing the Great American Novel Video Game” at Fiction Writers Review: “The keyboard we writers know so intimately… lives a double life, spellbound in passionate affairs with a video game community that dotes on it as affectionately as we authors ever have. For every keystroke a writer uses to describe character or establish scene, somewhere in cyberspace a gamer uses these same keys to navigate gunships and commandeer submarines.”
6
R. Kelly on Writing
“It’s almost like mama jokes to me. You got some good mama jokes and I got some, you hit me up then I got some. You go first show me what you got and if they good we gonna trade off and use em. We just change up and trade up.”
“You’re trying to throw a rock at the top of the Sears tower.”
“When I’m up twenty I always play like I’m down forty.”
“I usually don’t hear my influences til the song is over with. When I’m writing I’m so into what I’m hearing on the radio in my head that I’m just like, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to finish this so everybody else can hear what I’ve just heard.’ It’s like there’s a monster in the backyard, and you’re just like, ‘Look out the window, y’all!’ I just want people to hear what’s in my head and I just be anxious to get into the studio and get it done. Once it’s done it’s like, ‘Oh man, that riff right there is like some Sam Cooke shit.’”
“My greatest competition is, well, me…”
“I’m pregnant by music.”
“It’s a silent competition. But it’s all good if you know how to keep it in perspective and have fun with it. A lot of kats don’t understand that the point of a remix is to make it better than the record, not just change it. They think that if they just change it that should do it, but what they’re really doing is just killing the original song.”
“Not only did I get an A in music but I got an A in ladies.”
“Sometimes the doctor has to inject his own self.”
Two New Covers
Two excellent new covers for two books I am really looking forward to this year:
Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, from Featherproof Books Fall 2010, design by Zach Dodson
(which was just announced as a Featherproof title I think yesterday, on the heels of his smash The Cradle, and while you’re at it, take a look at the covers for Christian Tebordo’s The Awful Possibilities and Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s, (Daddy’s? wow), which are both also damn beautiful and exiting)
Tao Lin’s Richard Yates, from Melville House 9/7/10, photography by Michael Northrup
Alexis Orgera—
If I have to hear the phrase pitch perfect one more time, I’m going to throw up in someone’s shoes. What does that mean? I mean, what does it really mean?
P.S. The second installment of Group Effort is coming soon!
ropes, strings, poppea and 3 stories by Daniil Kharms
Watch all 3 parts.
They are lovely like fish.
Ryan Call—
Daniel Green of The Reading Experience has just posted a compilation of online interviews with contemporary writers over at Secondary Sound. Many classics are in there, but I also discovered a few I had not seen before. Feel free to supplement in the comments section.
Sean Lovelace—
Another arrow into February’s skull. New Hobart is out. All good, and this Laird Hunt interview (part two) amazing.